


The Next Job

by Lindstrom



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy/Copley, Booker betrayed Nile too, Booker in flashbacks, Captivity, Copley can't make them all disappear, Dubcon Kissing, Ensemble Cast, Eugenics, Exiled Booker | Sebastien le Livre, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe Needs a Hug, Joe/Nicky & Nile, Lots of plot, M/M, Nicky is a sniper with any weapon, Nicky!whump, Nile Freeman Needs a Hug, Nile Freeman is asexual, POV Multiple, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Steven Merrick's parents are alive and mad, This wasn't the first time Booker betrayed Joe/Nicky, anti-Booker, cells and biology, mentions of Nazis in one chapter, psychology of betrayal, sciencey stuff, sequel to the movie, what happened to the tissue samples?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 62,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26799922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lindstrom/pseuds/Lindstrom
Summary: Ten days after yeeting herself through the penthouse window in a grisly embrace with a dying Merrick, Nile set a spring loaded window punch against the tempered glass of the penthouse skylight and set it off. It shattered inward with a musical shimmer and both of them tensed. Copley had deactivated the alarm system, but their muscles still clenched in anticipation for a second until the time for an alarm to sound expired.Andy anchored the rope ladder and threw it into the skylight shaft. “I go first.”“Right, boss.”. . . . . .The team is safe, but when they escaped they left behind the tissue samples Dr. Kozak sliced out of Joe and Nicky. That's evidence Copley can't erase by using a computer. An attempt to find the tissue samples turns up information instead, and sends the team on a search to find and destroy the proof of their existence. But there's more proof than they know, because this wasn't the first time Booker betrayed them . . .
Relationships: Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & James Copley, Dr. Meta Kozak/Nicky Nicolo de Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 113
Kudos: 145





	1. Tissue Samples

**Author's Note:**

> You remember Andy beat the shit out of that guy on the bridge? They didn't kill him. I have unimaginatively named him 'Bridger' and made him Keane's successor. 
> 
> The date on Nile's phone was April 21. This fic starts a couple days after the movie ends.
> 
> There were a couple relationships I couldn't officially tag for because they weren't in the dropdown list and I didn't how to add them. The first is Joe/Nicky & Nile, or Joe/Nicky/Nile. Nile is asexual in this fic, and she and Joe/Nicky do end up in a romantic relationship that doesn't involve any sex with Nile.
> 
> The second relationship I couldn't tag for is Andy/Copley. That one is pretty light, but it is there.

Iselda Merrick wheeled her carry-on into the VIP lounge in Moscow and dropped heavily onto the armchair in the private booth while her husband fetched them drinks. In her 68 years on this planet, Iselda had been stunned to speechlessness on only one other occasion: when Great Britain voted in favor of Brexit. This time easily eclipsed that one. The phone call telling her that her son was dead still did not seem quite real. The 20 hour flight from Wuhan, China left a haze of fatigue layered over the disbelief.

Through the open door of the private booth, she could see the TV suspended from the ceiling, broadcasting in Russian, with English subtitles on one screen and French subtitles on another. Her son’s gruesome murder led the news. The police had nothing useful to say, as everything was part of a pending investigation. The text crawl below the visuals of Merrick Pharmaceuticals in London announced new suspicions of corporate theft. 

What would someone want to steal from them? Their best development in a decade, the human trials of the klotho hormone, had shut down due to unforeseen heart valve damage. Steven sent word by post office box. The Merricks always had a way to contact each other offline for truly sensitive matters. Post Office Box 356 in Wuhan had received only two letters in the four years Iselda and Carl Merrick had been in China, both of them about Dr. Meta Kozak’s klotho hormone trials dead-ending. 

The dead end was devastating, which was why Steven’s giddy excitement on their phone call six weeks ago had been so incongruous. The call wasn’t encrypted, so he hadn’t shared any details, just hinted at big news coming soon. Iselda hadn’t pressed him. Steven so enjoyed surprising them. 

A talking head on the TV had moved on to speculating about why Steven Merrick had such a large security force and shook his head again at the death tally of 32 men. Iselda dearly wanted to know who had gotten the drop on Keane. She’d personally selected Keane to head up security while she and her husband were in China, letting Steven have his trial run as CEO without parental oversight. 

Carl came into the small room carrying two drinks and shut the door behind him, blessedly cutting off the view of the TV. 

Iselda’s phone chimed, and then the screen dissolved into the encryption icon. Iselda took the vodka shot from Carl and set it aside while the encryption software scrambled the call. Carl pulled a stack of envelopes and paper out of his carryon and scattered the mess over the table. Iselda pushed the mess back towards him. Carl was brilliant in a medical lab and a disaster anywhere else. 

Iselda had always been secretly relieved that their only child was more like her than his father. Steven had gotten his deep-set eyes from his father, and his narrow chin from her. Really, he was the best of both of them, with a sharp mind and good business instincts. He’d gotten through his science classes and received his MD, but his real talents lay in the business realm, like hers. Carl was a bit disappointed by that. Iselda was not.

And now he was dead.

Iselda was not an emotional woman. She hoped to work up some tears at Steven’s funeral for appearances, but all her grief would be channeled into solving the mystery of who had killed her son and then making them regret it.

The call connected. Clancy shared the split screen with a grizzly white man who looked vaguely familiar. He appeared to be in a hospital room; Clancy’s background was a conference room that Iselda didn’t recognize. The entirety of Merrick Pharmaceuticals was locked down as a crime scene.

“Ma’am, this is Ian Bridger, one of only two men from the security force that survived the attack,” Clancy said.

“Who’s the other one?” Iselda asked.

Bridger answered before Clancy could. “Dalen Mackey. He hid in the bathroom when the fighting broke out.”

“He’s already been fired,” Clancy rushed to assure her.

“Report,” Iselda directed Bridger.

Bridger started with a summary of their positions and the commands from Keane. “We knew only that there were hostiles in the building. I found out there were five of them when they ambushed me on the skywalk. Two women, three men, armed to the teeth. The Caucasian woman was using an axe.” Bridger paused so that Iselda could make an appropriately shocked reaction.

“Go on,” Iselda said.

“Yes ma’am. I’m surprised they didn’t kill me. They wanted to know where your son was, but I wouldn’t tell them. They’d searched the entire building for him. I feel like this was a targeted assassination, ma’am. We all knew what a visionary Steven Merrick was, and I’m sorry for your loss ma’am, but whoever did this threw too much firepower at us to be just corporate theft like the news is saying. I slowed them down as much as I could, but by the time I tried to fight them off, they’d killed a couple dozen of us already. They wouldn’t leave until they’d killed Mr. Merrick too.”

“Understood,” Iselda said before the man could say anymore about Steven’s death. “Have you reviewed the security camera footage? Can we get an ID on the attackers?”

“It’s gone,” Bridger said.

“The security camera footage has been tampered with,” Clancy confirmed. “We don’t have any visuals on the assassins.”

“Is that Keane’s fault?”

“No ma’am. Security footage from cameras on floors that did not see combat activity were not affected. The deletions are deliberate.”

“Would you recognize them again if you saw them?” Iselda demanded of Bridger.

“Absolutely. All five of them.”

“Clancy, Bridger is to be given every resource to aid him in tracking these assassins.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Carl’s mess of paper encroached on Iselda’s space again. When she went to push it away, a letter caught her eye. That was Steven’s handwriting, addressed to P.O Box 356 in Wuhan, China. Iselda pressed mute on the call and waved the envelope at Carl. “How long have you had this?”

“Oh, I sent Qiu to check the box when we were packing up, then I must have put it with other papers,” Carl said apologetically. He was always apologetic when he had royally fucked up. 

Iselda was already tearing the envelope open. Steven had found a way to tell them who had killed him, Iselda was sure of it. She unfolded the single sheet of Merrick Pharmaceutical letterhead. 

“I am replacing the SeLe cell line,” Iselda read aloud. It was the only sentence on the paper, written in Steven’s handwriting. The words swam before her eyes, as if Steven had announced he had found the elixir of immortal life, which, in a way, he had.

“Oh mein Gott,” Carl said.

Iselda unmuted the phone.

“Find me Dr. Kozak!” she ordered Clancy.

* * *

Ten days after yeeting herself through the penthouse window in a grisly embrace with a dying Merrick, Nile set a spring loaded window punch against the tempered glass of the penthouse skylight and set it off. It shattered inward with a musical shimmer and both of them tensed. Copley had deactivated the alarm system, but their muscles still clenched in anticipation for a second until the time for an alarm to sound expired.

Andy anchored the rope ladder and threw it into the skylight shaft. “I go first.”

“Right, boss.”

Nile fastened her gun into the thigh holster and followed Andy down, dropping from the ceiling where the rope ladder ended and landing in a crouch.

“Room clear.”

Nile nodded and the two women moved on silent feet from the master bedroom down the hall and through the living room. The broken glass from Joe and Nicky’s entrance last week had been swept up. The plastic sheeting taped over the empty window cases billowed in and out with the night breezes, ghostly and rasping in the moonlight. Andy’s flashlight stayed at their feet, illuminating their way. It was easier to break into Merrick Pharmaceuticals by coming over the roof from the neighboring building. The security guards who were securing the building stayed together in clumps on the lower levels.

Weapons out, they glided down the stairs, heading for the lab where the team had been held prisoner. With the security system deactivated, they didn’t need cards to get into the lab. The lab was windowless, so once the door shut behind them, Andy flipped the light switch on.

Andy’s expression didn’t change at the sight of the four medical beds where they’d been strapped in. She’d flat refused to let Joe and Nicky come on this mission, even when Joe pulled the mortality card on her and asked what would happen if things went wrong and she got killed.

“Nile can haul my dead ass out of there and you can carve ‘I told you so’ on my tombstone,” Andy had said.

That ended the discussion.

They hadn’t talked about Andy’s mortality at all. If Nile had known she was going to shut down the topic so thoroughly, she would have tried for a little more heart to heart the first time they stormed this damn building.

“You start on that side. We meet in the middle,” Andy said, giving Nile the half of the room where she and Booker had been strapped down. 

Nile holstered her gun again and started opening drawers and cabinets. The first cabinet contained surgical garb and bags of fluid. The boxes marked with the biohazard sign were just pills. Nile quickly rifled through the cabinet and moved on. Shelves, drawers, more cabinets. The room wasn’t that big. Within a few minutes, she met Andy in the middle of the room.

“Nothing,” Andy said in disgust.

“There’s a door behind you,” Nile said. “Maybe the tissue samples are there. Anything look like a fridge? Don’t you have to refrigerate tissue samples?”

The door led into a computer room with over-sized monitors. Nile checked, but the hard drives were bolted to the floor. Andy was yanking cabinets open, searching behind medical supplies.

“Is that a filing cabinet?” Nile asked in disbelief. Who used those anymore?

Andy pulled a drawer open and got out a paper file. “Looks like Italian; the dates are 60 years ago. Grab some of these. Maybe Nicky can figure them out.”

Nile pulled a handful of manila folders at random and stuffed them into the satchel worn across her body. Andy shut that drawer and opened the bottom drawer. “These dates go back to the 1930s.” She slipped a couple files into her satchel. “Enough of that. We came for the tissue samples.”

“Copley’s sure they didn’t get taken as evidence?”

“He hacked the investigation database. No tissue samples listed in the evidence list. They might have been identified as something else, but if that’s the case, we’re going to have to break into Scotland Yard.”

Nile went back into the main room, sending her brain into recon mode. The tissue samples Dr. Kozak had taken from Joe and Nicky weren’t in the obvious places. Copley said the investigators didn’t have them. Who could have hidden or removed them?

“Dr. Kozak isn’t dead. I barely dislocated her shoulder,” Nile said.

“You should have hit her harder,” Andy observed. “That woman has ice for blood.”

“She was in the room after we left. She probably barricaded herself in. It would have been hours before the cops cleared the building and got her out. What did she spend that time doing? She couldn’t have taken the tissue samples with her because she would have been searched.” Nile paced the room, ending up near the door where she’d knocked Dr. Kozak to the ground. Something glinted under a rolling cabinet and Nile fished it out with her boot. A needle with a few broken shards of the syringe still attached. She’d come so close to joining her teammates as a guinea pig.

“Here! Can you hear the hum? This looks like a regular cabinet, but it’s a fridge!” 

Andy was behind the medical beds, kneeling down next to a row of locked drawers with laminate fronts. With the security system down, they opened immediately.

“Damn it,” Nile said, looking at the cold and empty drawers. The second drawer had a bottle tipped over, with a handwritten label identifying Specimen No. 06 collected 21 April 2020. Andy put it in her satchel.

“Let’s search the rest of the floor.”

On their way out of the lab, Nile passed a work station with office equipment. On a hunch, she stopped and looked at the desk. A printer, a few printouts, yellow highlighters and plastic paper clips cluttered the desk. And a stack of mailing labels. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“Those mailing labels.” Nile opened a drawer, then the cabinet below the work station. She pulled out a prepaid cardboard post office box from a stack of them. “Would someone have stopped the mail going out?”

“Not sure Copley’s tracked the mail. A place like this is likely to have an automated mail collection system. It may have gone out before they secured the building.”

Nile sorted through the paper on the desk until she found what she was looking for and waved it at Andy. “In this day and age, the only carbon copies left in existence are handwritten mailing labels. Look, that’s the date we busted outta here.”

“Blessed Mary Medical Clinic, P.O. Box 405223, Kyiv, Ukraine,” Andy read off the carbon copy.

* * *

“I’m not turning up a Blessed Mary Medical Clinic anywhere in Kyiv,” Copley said.

“Can you find out who owns the post office box?” Andy asked, hanging over Copley’s shoulder to watch the computer screen.

“If I was still CIA, I could make a formal request, but no postmaster worth anything would give out the identity just for asking,” Copley said.

“Perhaps the name of the clinic has been changed,” Nicky suggested, setting his elbows on his knees.

“How long does it take mail to get from London to Kyiv?” Joe asked from his place next to Nicky on the couch. “If we beat the box to Kyiv, we could stake out the post office.”

“The label has a tracking number,” Nile said, offering him the paper.

Copley typed in the tracking number. “I can confirm the box left the UK the day after it was mailed. Hold on. It’s going to take me a bit longer to track this through the continental mail stream.”

The four of them waited for Copley as he pecked at his keyboard. Andy walked to the window, half-turned away from them, looking down at the traffic from their 8th floor window. Nicky stacked the manila folders on the coffee table and looked through one of them.

“Are they in Italian?” Nile asked, crowding Nicky a bit until he scooted over to make room for her to sit down.

Nicky shook his head. “Romanian.”

“Can you read Romanian?”

“About as well as I read Italian,” Nicky replied.

“Is Romanian your second language?” Nile asked. They hadn’t had time to sit around and talk about just how smart everyone was. Nile knew some conversational Spanish because they lived in a neighborhood with a large Hispanic population, and enough Pashto to offer a kid a piece of gum, and other than she only spoke English. 

“Every language is a second language to me,” Nicky said with a barely-there smile. “Almost nothing survives from the language I grew up speaking. But all languages are related. This medical jargon is difficult to understand. It looks like these documents have the results of experiments. You see, here are dates, and in each column, there are numbers. Perhaps they are measurements; perhaps they are counts. I don’t know what these abbreviations mean.”

“Nothing interesting?” Andy asked, walking over to put a hand on Nicky’s shoulder and lean over to see what he was looking at.

“I don’t know what it means. It came from Dr. Kozak’s lab. If I knew what she was working on, perhaps I could find some meaning,” Nicky said.

Joe pulled two files from the bottom of the stack and handed one to Nile, sitting back on the couch to thumb through it.

“The klotho hormone,” Copley said absently.

“What?” Nile asked.

“Dr. Kozak was working on the klotho hormone. The goal was to arrest common cognitive decline and do away with dementia. Merrick wanted to extend the human lifespan,” Copley said.

“In 1962?” Nicky asked. “These files are from 1962.”

Copley shook his head.

“Mine is from 1946,” Joe said. “Something about bone marrow and radiation. This file is in English.”

“The box was delivered to the post office in Kyiv yesterday,” Copley said, and they all set the folders down.

“I wonder why it didn’t get caught as a biohazard. I mean, that thing isn’t refrigerated and it spent a week in delivery trucks,” Nile said. “Who knows what Blessed Mary Medical Clinic found when they opened that box.”

“Nicky?” Andy asked.

“The doctor may have packed everything in formalin. That can stay at room temperature. Or the tissue samples might not decay like ordinary tissue samples would,” Nicky said. “We don’t know how our immortality would . . . would.” Nicky stopped talking.

Joe put a hand on Nicky’s shoulder and Nicky reached up and took it. From his other side, Nile rubbed his arm in comfort. Nicky gave her one of those smiles that moved his cheek muscle more than his mouth. Nile loved that ghost of a smile. It encapsulated Nicky’s entire personality - a calm surface hinting at so much richness and depth just out of sight unless you knew what to look for. No wonder Joe had been fascinated with him for nearly a thousand years.

“If there’s nothing about this medical clinic online, then we have to go to Kyiv. We can ask around if there’s been a name change, or stake out the post office and follow someone,” Joe said. “Boss? Our turn?”

Andy nodded. “Copley needs longer in London until he can make sure Interpol and Scotland Yard lose some reports. You two can keep this job moving along from Kyiv. Nile, you and I will stay with Copley.”

Nile suspected that Andy wanted to give Joe and Nicky some time alone. Besides, Copley needed her help. Andy seemed to think that Copley could just wave a magic wand over the Internet and erase them. Nile knew that wasn’t going to work, especially not with all the physical evidence of the battle at Merrick Pharmaceuticals.

“How’s it going? With the security tapes and things?” Nicky asked.

“I’m erasing everything I can access,” Copley said, looking back down at his computer with his lips pressed together.

“Good, that’s great,” Joe said.

Nile wondered if she was the only one who heard Copley when he said he couldn’t make them disappear the way Andy wanted him to make them disappear. Copley could get at private security tapes. Maybe he had a contact at the CIA still, or even someone at Scotland Yard or Interpol. But nothing he did was going to get rid of the physical proof that something scary strange had gone down at Merrick Pharmaceuticals the other week. There were too many bodies, for one thing, and a couple survivors.

Two of the security guards had survived. One because they didn’t kill the guy on the skywalk, and one because he hid in the bathroom and missed the whole thing. Copley couldn’t get to those guys, or even find out what they were telling the investigators. Same thing with Dr. Kozak. She was either in protective custody, or she’d fled the country. Dr. Kozak knew  _ everything, _ and Copley didn’t know where she was.

He’d fed a couple reporters some bullshit about corporate theft gone wrong and they’d eaten it up, taking the opportunity to howl about medical ethics. The public might accept that, but Nile didn’t believe Steven’s mother would. She’d watched a news clip of Steven Merrick’s funeral posted to YouTube. Iselda Merrick painted on a few tears, but the real emotion on her face was cold, hard determination. It didn’t matter what Copley did to the Internet, Steven’s mother was going to find them. 

* * *

Twelve days after she feared she’d lost her chance for a Nobel Prize, Dr. Meta Kozak found hope again. 

When her test subjects left the lab, Dr. Kozak had maintained enough presence of mind despite the searing pain in her shoulder to realize that the lab would be searched. She placed most of the specimen jars and tubes in a box and mailed them to one of the Merricks’ network of post office boxes, using the name of her father’s clinic. She kept one specimen jar. As a breast cancer survivor, Dr. Kozak had a prosthetic in her bra. Gouging out the foam, she made room for the specimen jar where the police wouldn’t find it in a pat down. 

She was correct. The police found a thumb drive in her pocket and kept that. The specimen jar went undiscovered. After getting her shoulder treated and enduring several hours of questioning, in which Dr. Kozak shamefacedly admitted to not getting signed consent forms from two of the patients who participated in recent medical tests and said she was very sorry, the police sent her home. They didn’t even tell her not to leave the country.

Dr. Kozak left for Romania the next day.

The specimen she kept was part of a kidney. In the intensity of collecting the specimens, she hadn’t labeled the bottle correctly and she couldn’t remember which one she had taken it from, either Joe or Nicky. She named the specimen jar JoNi. 

Her father’s medical lab was state-of-the-art, with equipment she hadn’t had at Merrick Pharmaceuticals, but all she really needed for this experiment were petri dishes, cell culture medium and a microscope. The days spent trying to acquire samples of cancerous kidney tissues were the longest delay. 

Working carefully to avoid contaminating her one precious sample, Dr. Kozak shaved a few millimeters from JoNi and added it to the petri dish where the cancerous kidney tissues were growing. She waited overnight before preparing a slide for examination. 

What she saw under the microscope made her smile. The cancerous cells that had come into contact with the JoNi cells showed no sign of cancer. She had just discovered the cure for kidney cancer. That was neither unethical nor immoral, and that self-righteous man with the proud nose and uncanny eyes could keep his high-handed judgmental comments to himself. She would tell him so when she had him strapped to a medical table again.

“What are you working on, daughter?”

Meta turned towards her father and proudly informed him that she had just healed cancerous kidney cells.

Dr. Victor Kozak asked questions and studied the slide himself before probing deeply into her methodology.

“What is the source of your curative cell line?” her father asked.

“A human donor.”

Victor studied her, his bushy eyebrows merging into a unibrow when his forehead wrinkled.

“Merrick procured him. He wasn’t harmed in the procedure,” Meta said defensively. He wasn’t. Temporary pain wasn’t harm.

Victor still said nothing.

Meta lowered her voice, as if anyone else might intrude into this highly secure facility. “Merrick found a way to replace the SeLe cell line.”

Now Victor spoke. “And you have known this for the two weeks you have been here and said nothing?” he demanded. “Is this why Iselda Merrick herself has been calling here, asking if I have seen you?”

Meta faltered and then recovered. “I had nothing to report earlier. Now I do.”

“The secure comm is on the sixth level.”

Meta felt like she was being sent to her room like a rebellious youth, rather than reporting a resounding success as a respected medical researcher. It soured the experience for her. Iselda Merrick soured it further by downplaying Meta’s accomplishment and focusing instead on reacquiring the human donors.

“None of the other tissue samples have been recovered. You are not to use that tissue sample again until we have the donors in our control,” Iselda said in the tone people used when it never entered their minds that someone might disobey.

“And when will that be?” Meta asked.

Iselda’s lips pressed together into a thin line. “We are assembling a containment team.”

Meta smiled. She couldn’t outright disobey Merrick because her father’s clinic needed the funding, but it appeared she had a bargaining chip. “Do you know the location of the rest of the tissue samples? Or the donors?”

“Do you?” Iselda demanded.

“If I tell you, I want permission to use the rest of the JoNi kidney sample as I see fit. No conditions.”

Iselda raised an eyebrow.

From her father, Meta had learned the value of staying quiet in a negotiation. She waited silently.

“Fine,” Iselda said at last.

From outside the camera frame, her father winked at her in congratulations.

“I put the tissue samples in the mail and left the mailing label where the donors would find it. Everything you want is at P.O. Box 405223 in Kyiv.”


	2. Post Office

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joe and Nicky start processing the emotional fallout from Booker's betrayal.

The feminine automated voice announced their arrival at Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Nicky exited the Metro car, a hand holding the strap of Joe’s satchel so they wouldn’t get separated in the press of bodies. The crowd ebbed and flowed like an accordion, one moment stretching out the distance between them to the length of Nicky’s arm, the next pushing them close enough that Nicky rested his hand lightly at the small of Joe’s back.

Joe slept deeply the night after they parted company with Booker, the first time he’d slept through the night since their escape. The tension of Nile and Andy’s foray back to the lab faded, and the days since then heralded a return of his exuberant and passionate lover. Joe felt deeply and thoroughly, and then his equilibrium drew him back to his center. Yet Nicky had seen shadows in his happiness in the two days they’d spent on trains crossing Europe. They had not spoken of Booker’s betrayal, Andy’s mortality, or Nile’s misplaced compassion for Booker. 

As many languages as Nicky spoke, and as many words as he knew, he did not think there was a word to describe Booker. Betrayal, tradimento, khiana, trahison, turokam, traición, proditione. His brain kept picking words out of the languages he’d learned over the centuries and throwing them at him, angrily, like stones at a thief.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to not tell Andy about what Booker had done all those decades ago in Berlin. 

Joe had the right of it - yelling out his fury at Booker’s betrayal as soon as he’d learned of it. Nicky was just as angry, but he turned the anger inwards and trapped it inside his own heart. He really shouldn't do that. This time away from Andy and Nile would give the two of them time and space to process Booker’s betrayal without the weight of Nile’s fear and Andy’s sadness. 

Andy had explained Nile’s fear. “We’re her only family now, and she just lost one of us before she even had a chance to know him. She has to believe we can heal together, or what does she have left? Nothing. That’s why she wanted us to all stay together. She wasn’t saying that what Booker did should be brushed aside and forgotten.” 

Nicky understood that, but it still twisted his heart to hear Nile suggest mercy for the man who had strapped Joe to that table and carved slices out of him. She didn’t know what she was asking. Nicky could forgive her innocence, but he couldn’t listen to her say it again. 

Out in the spring sunshine, Nicky and Joe turned their steps towards the Hotel Kreschatyk. The team hadn’t been here when fire destroyed the massive Trade Unions Building during the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014. Nicky’s eyes lingered on the replacement, built back as massively as before, but without the hammer and sickle. Kyiv’s city council had done its best to rid the city of the hated Soviet symbol and its reminder of the thousands upon millions killed by the Soviet government when it took Ukraine’s food and left its population to starve. 

Where had he and Joe been during the Great Hunger? Nearly a century ago, wasn’t it? Before the Spanish Civil War, but not by much. If they had fought the Great Hunger, Booker wouldn’t have been in Berlin. Nicky was almost certain Booker’s disastrous activity in Berlin was the same time as the Great Hunger. Frequently, the decades ran together, one tragedy bleeding into another. Copley’s board recorded the good they’d done, but all their efforts were set against a backdrop of the world’s unending horrors.

Nicky stopped looking at the architecture and looked at the ground instead. Joe found his hand and squeezed. 

At the hotel, Nicky handed the desk clerk the credit card. The credit card came from Copley, and they had been using it as they crossed Europe, trusting Copley to erase them as they went.

Trusting Copley.

Andy had made the decisions about whom to trust for so long now. Second guessing her unsettled him, but how could he not second guess her after what had happened? They would never really be safe again. Safe like they used to be, unnoticed, hidden in plain sight because no one knew who they were or what they were. Copley and Merrick weren’t the end. Kill one. Trust the other. Madness.

It wasn’t until Joe reached out to take the offered credit card that Nicky realized he’d been lost inside his head again. Joe brushed against his arm.

They set their meager belongings in the hotel room. Nicky rooted through the bag in search of clean underwear. He wanted a shower. Joe sat on the mattress and began pecking at the phone Copley had given them. Nicky rested a hand briefly on Joe’s hair as he walked past him.

“There’s hot water, Joe!” Nicky announced from the bathroom. Of all the conveniences humanity had invented in the past 200 years, hot running water was his favorite.

Joe took that as an invitation, stripping down and joining Nicky in the shower. Fortunately, the western-style tub was big enough for both of them. Nicky rubbed himself clean with the rough washcloth, then stepped around Joe to give him a turn in the spray. Joe took his time, scrubbing at his scalp until Nicky knocked his hands out of the way and took over the job, pouring on the conditioner Joe brought. Joe put his arms around Nicky’s waist while Nicky turned the wash job into a head rub.

Joe’s hands at his waist tightened, and his mouth landed on Nicky’s neck. Nicky left one hand in Joe’s hair and slid the other down his ribs and hip. Joe shifted, giving Nicky room to reach Joe’s hardness. Nicky slipped his tongue into Joe’s mouth, thrusting and sucking and kissing while he stroked Joe off. When he got close to climax, Joe turned his head out of the kiss and bit down on Nicky’s shoulder. He came with a shudder and strangled gasp. Nicky cradled him close, chasing drops of water down his back and pressing light kisses along his cheekbone. Joe turned it into a proper kiss, his hands languid and heavy on Nicky’s back.

“Amore mio,” Joe murmured, “what shall I do for you?”

“Later tonight,” Nicky said. “Get dressed and let’s have dinner.”

“Food first. My lover is practical,” Joe said with a twinkle in his eye.

How Nicky loved Joe’s happiness.

At the restaurant, they ate a simple dinner of potato pierogi and borscht with endless cups of tea. The urgency of the assignment faded in the restaurant, with all evening and all night before they could even find the location of the post office box and work out a schedule to stake it out. Tonight was theirs. 

“Let’s listen to the river flow,” Joe said when they left the restaurant. 

They rode the Metro one stop to the Hydropark, the amusement park situated on a few islands in the middle of the Dnieper River that bisects Kyiv. Joe took Nicky’s hand as they walked through the tiny island to the river bank and seated themselves on the sand, facing the city. 

As it always did, the sound of flowing water soothed his senses. Humans were not meant to be immortal. Their minds struggled with the concept of immortality and how it changed everything about how they processed death, fear, love and meaning. Rivers are immortal, both permanent and ever-changing. Their lives were a river and listening to it flow reminded him of how he connected to this world.

The golden domes of Pechersk Lavra reflected the evening sunlight, spreading a halo around the Christian monastery across the water. The Lavra had been around about as long as he and Joe had. It comforted him to see something else, something that mortals had built, last that long.

Gradually, the two of them leaned in until their shoulders were touching. Nicky had two anchors that had grounded him for a millennia, and Joe was one of them. The other anchor was his conviction that he had been given a long life to do good. This was the source of his confusion - he did not know how to do good to Booker.

“In all my life, Joe, betrayals have been rare,” Nicky said.

Joe’s warm brown eyes asked him to keep going. Nicky threaded their fingers together. “I don’t know what is the right thing to do. Do I forgive Booker? Do I banish him forever? Jesus never spoke to Judas again, after the betrayal. Must I do more than the Lord?”

“Nicolò, you have so much desire to do good and to be good that this world does not deserve you. Yet you are here and I’ll keep you here with me forever because I am selfish and would not let go of you even if your Lord himself should ask me. When your goodness causes you pain, my Nicolò, I will stay with you until the hurting stops. Your goodness will outlast the pain.”

One of the many things Nicky loved about Joe was the way he never replied to a terrible emotion with a platitude. Instead, he would take Nicky to his heart and give him a safe place to wrestle with the emotion. Nicky closed his eyes and let his entire world become the feel of Joe’s shirt against his face and the sound of Joe’s heart beating a rhythm against the smooth rush of the river.

“Joe, I don’t want to hate,” Nicky said, and the tears that had hidden in his eyes finally fell.

“Nicolò, I’m here,” Joe promised. “I’m always here.”

“I can’t understand what he did, Joe. I know he was lonely. I know he wants the immortality to end. But I cannot understand how he could do this to us when we are a team. I must solve this mystery before I will know what to do about Booker.” 

The lowering sun turned the river into molten gold. 

“Will you trust him again for Nile’s sake? In a hundred years, will you trust him so we can all be together again?” Joe asked.

Trust Joe to cut straight to the heart of any problem. Joe was compassionate, yes, but he believed that the quickest slice into the middle was more compassionate than circling around an issue and taking it on a little at time.

“We’re Nile’s only family now. Booker is part of that, a hundred years from now and right now,” Nicky said.

It wasn’t an answer. Joe didn’t press for more. 

Nicky shifted out of Joe’s arms and they sat side by side without touching until the sun slid down to dusk and turned the water silver. Then Joe leapt to his feet and held out a hand to Nicky. Nicky took his hand, and Joe pulled him to his feet strongly enough that he stumbled and Joe had to catch his forearms until Nicky found his footing. A woman walking past with a boyfriend’s arm around her shoulders winked at him and Nicky ducked his head with a bashful smile.

Joe grinned, teeth flashing white against his black beard and brown skin. “After a thousand years, you still blush.”

“A thousand years from now, I will still blush.”

“I take that as a promise.”

“I meant it as a promise.”

They joined hands for the walk back to the Metro.

* * *

Late that night, with their legs still tangled together and the sweat from their lovemaking drying on their naked bodies, Nicky asked the question that had been fomenting in his conscience. “If the scientists can make use of what they took from us, should we let them?”

Joe propped his head up on his hand, a fingertip tracing Nicky’s clavicle. He meant for Nicky to go on and explain his thinking before Joe would reply.

“It’s possible the tissue samples and blood have decayed, rotted like any meat left out, and are now useless. But if they haven’t, if something about our immortality keeps it from rot, should we leave it in the hands of the scientists? We try to do good, Joe. The reason we take jobs is to do good. What if they can discover something from us? That would do good. We no longer need this tissue and blood,” Nicky said. The one specimen jar that Andy had found in the lab had not shown signs of decay by the time they left London.

“You know the story of the goose that lays the golden eggs. The scientists would not be content with a golden egg. They would come for the goose.”

“Is this our only fear? We aren't so selfish that we would deny the doctors and scientists a medical discovery if it cost us nothing more than we have already suffered. Is it only the fear that these tissue samples may tell the world that the goose exists?”

“Isn’t that enough, Nicky? Do we need more than the fear of being captured again?” 

“We want to do good, Yusuf. Sometimes, I read on the Internet about a friend giving another friend a kidney. It saves a life.”

“I love your generous heart, Nicolò, and I'll kill scientists until the gutters run with blood if they try to strap you down and take your kidney every day for the rest of our immortality. We choose how we do good. Everyone chooses how they do good. No one else makes that choice for us. We do not choose to be a medical experiment.”

Joe’s voice flattened out with certainty. His passionate, exuberant Joe became calm and immovable at times. 

“We should have told Andy about Berlin.”

Had they betrayed Andy to keep Booker’s secret? Nicky shuddered at the thought.

* * *

The JoNi tissue sample belonged to her now, so Dr. Kozak saw no reason to keep Iselda Merrick informed of its use. 

“It’s an injection, not a surgery. I will use a local anesthetic to numb the area, and it will be over in seconds,” Dr. Kozak promised Dietmar Otto.

Dietmar’s son was the one who hadn’t been convinced yet. He was a blustery man in his thirties, angry that their family fortune could not cure his father’s kidney cancer. Luis had already asked far too many questions, and was suspicious that Dr. Kozak did not want another doctor present while she administered the treatment. This procedure wouldn’t be possible if Dietmar was in the hospital, but over the years of his illness, the family had gradually turned a room in his palatial home into a hospital room. Dialysis machines, monitors, medical beds and wheelchairs sat amongst the smell of antiseptic.

Dietmar had already agreed to the injection. Luis couldn’t stop her, but he could make trouble. Dr. Kozak had been in their home for two days already, talking to Luis and telling him everything except for what she was really doing. Dr. Kozak had told them that Merrick Pharmaceuticals had been on the cusp of a breakthrough in kidney cancer treatments, and that was what the thieves were after when they murdered Steven Merrick. This was the revolutionary treatment that the younger Merrick had died for. She knew it worked and she did not want to wait until the authorities finished their investigation.

Once she’d gotten Dietmar to sign a payment arrangement (€40 million at each clear cancer screening for the next two years) and a confidentiality agreement, it was a matter of waiting while Dietmar argued with Luis. If this worked, she would be the woman with the miracle cure for kidney cancer, and enough funding to start her own lab rather than feeding off Merrick Pharmaceuticals for the rest of her life. That had been good enough for her father, but she was tired of taking orders from the Merricks. 

If it didn’t work, then Dietmar would die a few months earlier than he would have anyway.

At long last, Luis grudgingly agreed to the treatment.

Meta didn’t waste time. Within twenty minutes, she had the needle deep in Dietmar’s back and pressed the plunger, injecting JoNi cells into Dietmar’s ruined kidney.

Two hours later, they took him off dialysis.

Three hours later, a grateful Dietmar had already made the first payment.

Four hours later, Dr. Meta Kozak was yelling about the confidentiality agreement and threatening a lawsuit.

* * *

The kidnappers had never separated the two of them, yet Joe couldn’t shake the fear that Nicky would disappear if Joe let him out of his sight. The hotel room was small; if he couldn’t see Nicky, he could hear him. He could reach out and touch him, kiss him, reassure himself body and soul that Nicky was here. Confused and still hurting, but as long as the two of them were together, they could handle everything else.

From his seat on the edge of the bed, Joe could watch Nicky shave. He watched him rinse his face and towel off. He watched him clean the disposable razor and throw away the tiny bottle of hotel shaving cream. He watched Nicky wipe down the counter with the towel and then hang it back up. He watched Nicky walk towards him and sit next to him on the bed.

“You are always watching me,” Nicky said.

Joe grinned at him. “In a thousand years, you are still the most handsome man I have ever seen.”

Nicky smiled but his gaze made it clear he knew that wasn’t why Joe was watching him. Nicky laid down on the bed, turned on his side, and tugged on Joe’s shirt until he laid down, facing him but not touching. He slipped easily into the mishmash of Italian and Arabic that no one else could understand. “You listened to me yesterday. Now it's your turn to talk. When Andy told us what Booker had done, you were angry but not betrayed.”

Joe tucked his hands under his chin. “Betrayal requires trust. You know I haven’t trusted Booker since Berlin. I never expected him to betray the entire team, but he did not shatter my trust because I took it back almost a hundred years ago.”

Nicky reached over and ran fingers through Joe’s black curls. “You are wise. I thought it was cynicism, but it was wisdom.”

“No, Nicky, don’t reproach yourself. I don’t trust as easily as you do because I don’t believe in humanity’s essential goodness the way you do. You stay as you are. I wouldn’t have you change.”

“So it is not betrayal that shadows your happiness. What then?”

“Do you remember the first times we died?” Joe asked.

“Those were worse than anything that came after.” 

“Why? We’ve died so many times, Nicolò. Why were the first times the worst?” 

“I’m not the one who needs to say it,” Nicky replied.

Joe blinked at tears that stung his eyes but did not fall. “The fear,” said Joe. “The pain, yes, always the pain, but those first times I didn’t know I would live again before the resurrection. I knew I would die and I was afraid. The fear does to the mind what the pain does to the body. Our minds don’t heal as fast as our bodies.”

“Our minds have memory,” Nicky said. “Our bodies forget.”

“I have not been afraid of death in a millennia,” said Joe. “It hurts, but pain without the fear is just pain. Temporary, to be endured, but not to be feared. Booker gave me back the fear and it sits on my heart like a spider. Keane beat you and shot you, and it took so long for you to wake up -- every second lasted a thousand years. What if you lost your immortality like Andy? That was more horrible than any gun I had ever faced. I have not been so afraid in a millennia,” Joe confessed. “Even if I let go of my anger, how do I let go of my fear?”

Nicky took Joe’s hand. “I’m here.”

Joe pressed Nicky back onto the bed for a kiss, his fingers running along Nicky’s smooth jawline. Nicky reached back, reassuring Joe with hands and mouth that he was here. Joe buried his face where his neck joined his shoulder and then growled.

“Come! As much as I would love to spend all day in bed with you, we have work to do.” Joe rolled off the bed and pulled on Nicky’s hands until he stood up and fell into him. Joe pulled Nicky into a rough hug. He laughed out loud and slapped Nicky on the shoulder.

Nicky smiled back with that gentle smile that said he saw what Joe was trying to smother under exuberance. “I’m here,” he repeated softly.

Joe nodded. Yes, Nicky was here.

* * *

After finding P.O. Box 405223, Nicky and Joe applied for their own post office boxes. After much government red tape and a few days, Nikolai Ilyich Chergovski and Yosif Ivanovich Shevchenko each had a post office box and proof that the passports and bank accounts set up by Copley were going to work. Joe’s post office box was in the same corridor as the Blessed Mary Medical Clinic box; Nicky’s was around the corner. 

There were no sight lines into the post office, which complicated the stakeout. They couldn’t just remain in the corridor watching a box so they could follow whomever collected the mail. The two of them worked out a schedule for checking their post office boxes three times a day, with staggered times and clothing changes. That was six checks on the post office box every day.

“We’ll send each other mail, and then stand there and read it. We could spend twenty minutes or more, reading our mail,” Nicky said.

“My box is in the same corridor. I should spend the longest reading my mail.”

“I shall write you poetry.”

“I’ll stand in the corridor and read until I have sucked all the sweetness from your words,” Joe declared.

“No, I insist that you come home at night.”

Joe laughed and squeezed his arm. Then they went to a department store and bought paper and envelopes. That evening, they spent time online, signing up for catalogues and requesting free samples at any website offering free samples.

They worried that the box of tissue samples was already being tested and discussed among scientists and doctors, but the stakeout was still a chance to spend long, lazy nights naked with each other, and walk around Kyiv and play the tourist in between checking in at the post office. Parts of it felt like being on vacation.

Except for the phone call with Andy every night.

“Nothing today, boss.”

“Damn. We got nothing on our end either. Did you run down those addresses Copley sent?”

“We’ve visited every medical clinic in Kyiv. No one has heard of Blessed Mary Medical Clinic,” Joe said. “The only way we’re going to find this place is to follow the person who checks that box.”

Andy sighed and Joe could almost see her shoulders slumping. “Nile’s trying to read those files we took.”

“Any useful information?”

“She’s plugging it into google translate. It looks like they’re reports of experiments on cell growth and division. Nicky might understand the medical gobbledygook better.”

“If you send me scans, I’ll try to read it,” Nicky offered. He had his head pressed against Joe’s, hovering over the speaker on the phone.

“Too risky. Besides, we’re not going to find what we’re looking for in 80 year old medical paperwork.”

“How is the specimen jar?” Nicky asked.

Joe still didn't like Nicky’s idea that the scientists should keep what they took from their bodies.

“No change. Nile wants to look at it under a microscope, but there’s no visible decay or anything like that. Whatever our cells do doesn’t stop when they’re not part of us anymore. Have you heard of Henrietta Lacks?”

“Who?”

“She’s an African-American cell donor that Nile knows about. Immortal cells of some sort.”

“Another immortal?” Nicky asked.

“No, the cell donor died of cancer. It’s her cancer cells that are living forever.”

“I'll look into it.”

“Don’t. We don’t need someone tracking your Internet searches. Time enough after we get that box,” Andy replied.

“We’ve staked out the post office long enough to know the post office box is not checked regularly. Tomorrow, we’ll mail a package to Blessed Mary Medical with the tracker Copley gave us,” Joe said.

“Keep me posted.”

After they ended the call, Joe asked, “What kind of medicine did Merrick specialize in? Besides experimenting on prisoners.”

“Biogerontology, the study of aging. They want to slow it down. That young CEO had a Ted talk about it on YouTube.”

Joe put up an eyebrow.

“Nile showed it to me one afternoon when you and Andy were scouting the new safehouse. He had some good ideas.”

“Good ideas to do something that might be a bad idea. Some people don’t want to live forever, and some people shouldn’t live forever,” Joe said. “Can you imagine if Joseph Stalin lived any longer than he did?”

They had talked about this before. If no one died, children would become scarce. Change would slow down. Some would thrive; some would stagnate. Their team had lived long enough to know not everyone mourned when their parents died. Unfettered access to immortality would cause as many problems as it solved. 

Nicky and Joe were both sympathetic towards the idea of curing diseases. Curing diseases had already lengthened the average lifespan by decades. But to change the design of the human body so it did not die at all? That was a different question altogether. They both agreed that nothing that lives should live forever.

“They won’t be able to do it. God created death when he created birth. Science can change some of the details, but the fundamentals are set.”

“And then he took us out of that loop,” Joe said. He moved a stack of junk mail and sat next to Nicky. 

“Not entirely. We were born. We will someday die.” Nicky shifted to let Joe lean against him. “The timing for us is different, but not the events.”

“As long as we go together,” Joe said. “Don’t you worry about what would happen if one of us died first?”

“I don’t believe God would do that to us.”

Joe thought that opinion was based more on Nicky’s goodness than on the goodness of any deity that mankind had worshipped over the past millennia. Nicky wouldn’t do that, and Joe had long since accepted that he trusted Nicky’s goodness more than that of any god. 

“What about Quynh?” Joe asked.

Nicky didn’t answer, and Joe kissed Nicky and murmured an apology. He shouldn’t have tried to get Nicky to share his fear when Nicky was struggling in his own moral quagmire right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story of Henrietta Lacks is told in [The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks](https://bookshop.org/books/the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks/9781400052189) by Rebecca Skloot.


	3. SeLe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nile confronts Copley about how he can't make them disappear; Copley admits something to himself he'd been avoiding; Andy grieves Booker's actions; and it turns out someone should have told Nile that Booker's real name is Sebastien Lelivre.

Nile was doing her level best to keep her feelings locked down and her brain in Marine mode. Focus on the mission. Focus on duty. Focus on the team. Andy had beat the shit out of her sergeants and thrown her unconscious body into the back of an MRAP four weeks ago. Her tour of duty wasn’t scheduled to end for another six weeks from today. So she wasn’t missing her family _yet,_ because even if she wasn’t getting drilled in hand-to-hand combat by a 6,000 year old woman, she’d be on near-combat duty in Afghanistan. 

She’d made the decision; Copley had already fixed it to look like she’d died of complications from her neck wound in Landstuhl. Dizzy and Jay would have a crazy story to tell, but the military believed records like the Bible, and she officially died in Landstuhl. The funeral was done. Copley printed out her obituary. It made her cry. Then she got back to work trying to hold this little team together and keep them from getting captured again.

Nile picked a day when Andy was out looking for batteries for a satellite phone and confronted Copley. “You can erase security tapes, but there were survivors, man, you can’t erase them. People know something happened. If you erase security tapes and destroy records, all you do is point a huge, flashing neon sign that says, ‘investigate this crazy stuff’ right at it.” Nile got the impression that Andy really thought Copley could make them disappear. Someone needed to be realistic about it.

“I’m planting misinformation too,” Copley said.

“Yeah, I saw that article about corporate theft gone wrong, and the call for a global medical ethics review board.”

“And unethical organ donation practices.”

“You’re planting a story that Merrick Pharmaceuticals kidnapped people to harvest their organs?” That was impressive. Pretty close to the truth, too.

“There have always been rumors that companies pay for organs, or don’t pay, as the case may be,” Copley said. “Merrick Pharmaceuticals is now credibly on that list.”

“So someone could figure all the deaths happened in a rescue, and no one looks any further about why a rescue happened,” Nile said slowly, piecing it together.

Copley smiled, lips pressed together because his smiles weren’t all that happy. “The general unbelievability of immortality works in our favor too. Even if the real story leaked, no one would believe it.”

“That’s good,” Nile said with a nod. She got a Coke from the fridge and offered one to Copley. 

He turned it down with a shake of his head. “No thank you.”

“What’s next? I mean, what are you working on now?”

“I’m searching for the Blessed Mary Medical Clinic,” Copley replied. “Nothing is showing up anywhere in Kyiv or the surrounding area.”

“Are you following the money? Because that sounds like a charity and it sounds Catholic. Who’s giving them money? Isn’t Ukraine more like Eastern Orthodox?”

“The money,” Copley said, like he really hadn’t thought that through before. “I should be able to find the expenditure disclosures for NGOs in Eastern Europe. The clinic might not be in Kyiv.”

“Yeah, I’ma start you a board,” Nile said. She got some corkboard and thumbtacks and started gathering up the printouts and notes Copley was leaving around the house like crumbs. Anything that kept her mind busy enough that it couldn’t listen to her heart sobbing in anguish.

* * *

It was just so fucking unfair that after 6,000 years she had to deal with something brand new. Shouldn’t everything be a repeat by now? Fucking stupid life that handed her mortality back to her without even an apology. What was she supposed to do with it? Hang around and get old? She wanted another mission. Copley needed to find them something to do, something heroic, so she could die fast in a blaze of glory and get it over with.

A lorry horn blared and Andy flinched.

Or she could get hit crossing the street.

Andy stood on the sidewalk, hands clenched around the bag holding the satellite phone batteries that Copley had sent her to pick up at the store. Nile wanted to go, but they were in a safe house in Norwich right now, which meant Nile and Copley had doubled the city’s black population. Nile was too memorable to run errands. Andy blended in better. Fuck, they needed to get back to a big city or get out of the UK entirely.

If she went back to the safehouse immediately, she’d just stew in her own worry and do something to make Nile look at her like she was either made of glass or was some kind of monster. Andy kept hitting all the wrong notes with Nile. 

“Don’t you ever wonder why we don’t see a light?” Nile asked Andy a couple days ago while the slice in her arm closed up.

“A light?”

“Like in those near-death experiences. Everyone says there’s a light and you should go towards it. We don’t see a light when we die,” Nile pointed out.

“That’s a hallucination, not a vision. Jesus isn’t lighting the way to heaven,” Andy answered.

“Yeah, I knew that,” Nile said, with a shrug and her look sliding away from Andy.

Fuck. Some people needed to believe in a god. Nicky was like that too. She’d been right to send Joe and Nicky away; they needed the space. But she kept thinking that Joe and Nicky would do a much better job with Nile right now. Something was going on in that kid’s head, and Andy was afraid that she’d fuck it up if Nile broke down and it was just her and Copley to pick up the pieces.

If she fucked up with Nile, would she turn out like Booker? She’d fucked up with Booker; she’d fucked up big time.

She’d known Nile for barely two months. She seemed to be on a more even keel than Booker was at the beginning, but that might just be youth and optimism. The thing was, she didn’t know how to comfort someone else when she couldn’t even get her own head straight. It had taken her a full day to realize she should have apologized instead of arguing when Nile confronted her about basically kidnapping her.

“You gotta work on your recruitment techniques, because they suck,” said Nile.

“I’m not out to win any popularity contests,” Andy had answered.

“That’s obvious. I mean, you beat up my superior officers and throw me in the back of an MRAP, then shoot me in the head in the desert and beat the shit out of me on a plane. You tell Copley that he's going to work with us or . . . or something bad might happen to him. If joining this team had anything to do with free will, none of us would do it.”

“None of us joined this team out of free will, Nile. I don’t know how to make a recruitment poster.” 

Andy had thought blunt honesty would be kinder than coddling her; later she’d realized Nile was trying to figure out how Andy was going to treat her. She’d ruined something with Nile. Nile was too much of a Marine to let that affect her work for the team, but the thing was, they’d always been more to each other than just co-combatants.

Hadn’t they?

Andy’s aimless wandering had brought her to a dog park, because people in this century had reduced the great outdoors so much that they had to set aside special places so dogs could still experience grass once in a while. Those poor damn dogs ran around and barked like they were out exploring a wilderness instead of mincing around on a manicured lawn while their owners picked up their poop in plastic bags. They didn’t even know what they were missing.

What they were missing.

Andy bowed her head and bit her bottom lip, sucking in a deep breath through her nose. Losing Quynh left a hole in her soul and she should never have tried to fill it. She’d needed someone, needed him so much. Fuck Booker forever, but she knew exactly how he felt about accusing Joe and Nicky of being too happy. She’d lain there on that medical table and listened to Booker’s lameass whining about being lonely and hated him for exposing all the things she hated most about herself. 

“All we had was our grief,” he’d said to Joe.

Booker said ‘we’ and Andy couldn’t protest him combining them like that. She’d let him see the pain and weakness that she kept concealed even from Joe and Nicky. She’d hoped Booker would help her out of her despair and instead he used it to destroy the team. 

She was more alone than she’d ever been. But she’d learned her lesson - trust no one with her grief and pain. That was her burden to carry alone.

* * *

Nile had good instincts. Copley turned her loose on social media with fake accounts to see if she could find anything about rumors from Merrick Pharmaceuticals. The official investigation was locked down in law enforcement databases. Copley could hack into them, but they all had digital tiger traps and it was hard to get back out in a way that couldn’t be traced. Nile could follow Iselda Merrick on Instagram and go data mining on Merrick Pharmaceuticals’ Facebook page. She was as likely to find something useful as he was. The news was fading out on the story. 

For now, Copley was deep into a list about Eastern Orthodox and Catholic medical charities operating in Europe. So many of them were named for the Virgin Mary that he’d sorted them by location and was starting at Kyiv and working out in a radius. The thing was, he didn’t really know what he was looking for. Sorting out every possible connection a medical charity might have with Merrick Pharmaceuticals was going to take a lot of data-sifting. He excelled at this. Investigator work mostly consisted of methodically looking at information and using a human brain to make connections that a computer wouldn’t notice. 

A director from a charity in Gdansk had attended a conference at Merrick four years ago. A doctor at a charity in L’viv was hired by Merrick last year. These charities went onto the board Nile had started. Then Copley went back to his data.

The photo of the director of the Saint Mary Medical Clinic in Voronezh stopped him. Dr. Svyeta Andreivich Turgenev looked enough like Andromache to be her sister. They had the same tiny noses, the delicate facial bone structure, the strength in the jawline and the proud lift to the head. Copley stared at her for several long minutes, remembering the difference between seeing all those photos of Andromache that he’d thumbtacked to the board, and the gut punch of finally seeing her in person in Marrakesh.

Yes, he knew all about Andromache’s despair by then, every word she’d confided to Booker that Booker then relayed to him to assure him that Andromache secretly wanted this, but couldn’t ask for it. He knew about her heroism, the sheer commitment of taking on fight after fight, the desperate rescues and never once turning her back on suffering if there was something she could do about it. Her strength fascinated him; her despair drew him.

He knew she wouldn’t turn down the job once she saw the picture of the schoolgirls. The photo was four years old, and the girls in it were smiling because they had just finished their exams and were going home for holiday. As far as he knew, every girl in the photo was safe and happy and always had been.

The next time he saw Andromache, she was writhing on his floor in the agony of a gunshot wound and betrayal, bleeding and yelling as Booker zip-tied her hands and forced her down.

At that point, Copley’s pursuit of the immortals had resulted in the death of 12 men in the kill box, five guards at the kill box facility, the men slaughtered at the church near Paris, and the four men in the armored van killed by Joe and Nicky. He kept telling himself it was worth it. If the end of disease cost the lives of a few people, it was still worth it.

When the end of disease was going to cost Andromache’s life, it wasn’t worth it anymore.

He told himself he didn’t know why her death would be any different.

Actually, he knew damn well why.

* * *

Meta Kozak managed to enforce the confidentiality agreement about Dietmar Otto’s miraculous cure in the only language the filthy rich understood: self-interest. 

“This is experimental,” she kept insisting until they actually listened to her. “The improvement may be temporary. If the cancer stays in remission for two years, then we will say something. We can’t reveal this prematurely. What if you need another treatment and by then I’ve given the cure to others because you told everyone and I don’t have enough left for you?”

Meta estimated she had enough tissue for ten or twelve more treatments. Would Dietmar require regular injections of JoNi cells to remain healthy? Would one treatment be a permanent cure? She had no way of knowing, other than to monitor Dietmar. This proved to be harder than she’d anticipated because once Dietmar was healthy again, he had no interest in spending his days in a hospital bed, quietly awaiting Dr. Kozak’s next exam. After much arguing, they agreed to meet at Dietmar’s home in Frankfurt once a month for 3 months. She couldn’t get him to agree to anything beyond that. 

Back at her father’s clinic, Meta called Bridger to ask the status of reacquiring the donors.

“Only two of them are watching the post office box,” Bridger told her.

“Why haven’t we taken those two!”

“That would tip off the other three. We need to take all of them together. Once all five are in the same location, we move in.” 

Meta hung up the phone, tense. 

“We’ve been making plans while you’ve been gone,” her father said. “We will capture all five at once, and then separate them. One of the donors will be kept here. I am readying a place on the third level. The Merricks are preparing locations for the others in Germany, the UK and two in China. That way, even if the worst should happen and they escape, we only lose one.”

“Here? We’ll keep one here? Which one?”

“Does it matter?” her father asked.

“I want the Italian.”

* * *

The next five weeks dragged by so slowly that Nile despaired of living for eternity. She wasn’t even going to make it until the end of the year until she went crazy. The countdown until her deployment period would have ended hung over her every moment. A few times she had checked out her brother’s Instagram, lurking in one of the anonymous accounts Copley had set up, and knew she couldn’t trust herself to do that very often. She shouldn’t do it at all. It made her cry to read the posts he put up on the one-month mark of her death date. They really shouldn’t have fought so much when she was alive. He felt guilty about it, and she couldn’t even tell him it was alright.

So it was a huge relief, for more reasons than one, when Copley announced he’d found Blessed Mary Medical Clinic.

“The name matches exactly, and Dr. Kozak’s father runs it. The clinic is in Borsa, Romania, actually about 80 kilometers northeast of the city itself, in a rural area. It’s got to be the one we’re looking for.”

“What kind of clinic is it?” Nile asked.

“Just a medical charity for a small and scattered community. They offer immunizations, well child checkups, that sort of thing. Little clinics like these mostly handle routine medical matters. The Kozak family has been running that clinic since the late 1940s.”

“I’ll text Joe and Nicky and let them know we’re coming,” Andy said, pulling out her phone.

Finally! Finally, the team would be back together. Teams should be together. The Marines taught her that; her mama taught her that; her high school volleyball coach taught her that. This team had fractured along fault lines that existed long before Nile joined up, and that worried her. She wanted them back together. Besides, maybe having a mission to plan would give Andy something to focus on and she’d stop looking like gossamer masquerading as steel.

Nile popped open another Coke can. “What are the chances Dr. Kozak’s dad sent the tissue samples back to Merrick already?”

“I don’t have a way to track the mail out of the medical clinic,” Copley admitted. 

“How did that beady-eyed little kid end up running a big company?” Andy asked.

Copley brightened the way he did every time Andy talked to him directly. It was getting kind of awkward. Nile wondered if Andy had noticed.

“The company was founded in the early 1900s in Germany. The first Merrick medicines were basically snake oil, but once medicines became scientific, the Merricks followed that trend.” Copley retrieved his board about Merrick Pharmaceuticals. It was one of his smaller boards, just a tri-fold thing that a high school kid might use for a science fair project. He opened it. Across the top was a timeline. “They were quite active in the Nazi pseudo-science that led into the Holocaust.”

“That shit about blond-haired blue-eyed people being the superior race?” Nile asked.

Copley nodded. “Eugenics and the Aryans. Even before Hitler took over the Nazi party, the Nazis were interested in eugenics and engineering a superior race. Eugenics was about making sure that only people deemed worthy became parents, and keeping anyone considered inferior from having babies. Doctors and medicines were part of that. Merrick Pharma was researching medicinal castration and sterilization methods,” Copley said.

“Creepy,” Nile said.

“The United States basically invented eugenics, legitimized it, passed laws to support it, and then Germany picked up the whole thing and turned it into the Holocaust,” Andy said.

Nile just stared at her.

“Truth,” Andy said. “California passed a law that allowed them to sterilize anyone they thought was unfit to be a parent. California sterilized about 20,000 people. Germany took that law as a blueprint, passed it in Germany, and sterilized 350,000. Then all that thinking about a superior race and reducing the population of undesirables. You know what Hitler did with that.”

Nile’s stomach churned and she set down her Coke. Even with all the shit going down in the United States right now, she’d thought they were the good guys in World War II.

“Merrick Pharma spent the 1930s trying to come up with a way to sterilize someone with an injection, something faster, easier and cheaper than a surgery. They failed, but along the way they learned a lot about reproduction,” Copley said. “When they moved to London and scrubbed their image of Nazism, they branched out into biogerontology. They don’t focus much on fertility anymore.”

Nile lost the thread of conversation. Another thing she was trying hard not to think about was the fact that none of her fellow immortals had kids, except for Booker, and they were born before he was immortal and he watched them all die. Nile wanted kids, she always had. Mama wanted to be a grandmama, and Nile had always wanted to help with that. That was all different now. No babies with silky cheeks and fuzzy hair, smelling of baby oil and spitup, getting excited about a tooth and praying for a full night of sleep. No tiny little person, all dressed up with a hair ribbon for her first day of kindergarten. No teenagers pushing the boundaries like Nile had, knowing mama would reign her in, scold her, and then love her anyway. None of that. She’d dropped off the cycle of life. She’d spend her whole long life as a spectator, an aloof rescuer suffering from emotional exhaustion.

Well, she was just a spectator for that whole ‘fall-in-love’ thing anyway, but asexual people could still have babies. They just didn’t enjoy the process of getting pregnant the way some people did. 

“Besides Dr. Kozak’s work on the klotho hormone, the company has been very involved in stem cell research,” Copley was saying when the buzz in Nile’s mind let her concentrate again. “Four years ago, Carl and Iselda Merrick installed their son, Steven, as CEO so they could go to Wuhan, China and work on stem cell research. The idea is to extend the human lifespan by devising ways to replace organs as they wear out.” He pointed to an area of his research board with organ diagrams. “Scientists can already guide stem cells into differentiating into tissues, and research scientists in Wuhan are very close to turning those tissues into functioning organs. Imagine if you could eliminate death from heart disease by growing new hearts.”

“Is that what they hoped to get from us? Stem cells?” Andy asked.

“I think they wanted you for whatever they could get. I have no idea how your immortality looks at a cellular level,” Copley replied.

“Our cells don’t die,” Nile said, pointing to the specimen jar on the windowsill. This week, she’d left it in the sunshine, with just a bit of plastic wrap over the top, to see if it would rot. As far as she could tell by looking at it and smelling it, that tissue sample hadn’t changed in the six weeks since the day that evil doctor carved it out of her teammate.

Copley nodded. “Merrick wanted to find out why, and then create a treatment he could sell.”

“Who’s that woman you talked about, Nile? The one whose cells never died?” Andy asked.

“Henrietta Lacks, the HeLa cells. Before HeLa, you couldn’t grow human cells in a petri dish long enough to do experiments. Once scientists had the HeLa cell line, all these medical breakthroughs happened because scientists could just order human cells and use them as long as they wanted for experiments and stuff. They didn’t ask Henrietta’s permission either, just took what they wanted and didn’t even tell her family,” Nile said.

“You’ve researched this,” Copley said.

“She’s African-American. My high school biology teacher told us about her. I read a book,” Nile said.

“Why HeLa?” Andy asked.

“That’s how they name cell lines. First two letters of a first and last name. Look, I’ll show you.” The manila folders they’d taken from the filing cabinet in Dr. Kozak’s lab were now at the bottom of a drawer. Nile grabbed the one on top, one written in German and dated 1933. She scanned the page and then showed it to Andy. “That’s the name of the cell line,” she said, pointing.

“SeLe,” Andy read, and holy fuck, she suddenly looked like she’d seen a ghost. “Copley, why did you decide to work with Merrick Pharmaceuticals? Why that company and not another one?”

Copley looked back and forth between them, brow wrinkled with the question, but Nile didn’t have any idea why Andy was melting either.

“Booker insisted on it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story of Henrietta Lacks is told in [The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks](https://bookshop.org/books/the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks/9781400052189) by Rebecca Skloot.
> 
> Andy's comments about eugenics come from [Building a Better Race; Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom,](https://www.amazon.com/Building-Better-Race-Wendy-Kline/dp/0520246748/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=building+a+better+race+by+wendy+kline&qid=1602551475&sr=8-1) by Wendy Kline, pages 31 and 103.


	4. Booker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Booker and Copley, from Surabaya to the kill box

**Surabaya, eight years ago**

Copley buzzed the security system, letting his contact in. The CIA outpost in Surabaya was rigged out with every sort of Internet and satellite connection imaginable, and a really lousy printer. Copley had thumbtacked printouts and photos to the gray walls, linking them with lines of yarn and handwritten post-it notes. Certain printouts were framed in a color-coded scheme to highlight patterns. Any place he inhabited for more than a week ended up festooned with pictures and notes and questions. Computers were good for sorting data, but to really see patterns and connections, you had to spread out enough to step back and look at it all. 

The board in Surabaya was full of grainy security photos, newspaper articles printed out with the dates highlighted, and social media posts begging people for help to find missing loved ones. The slick ads promising education and work, translated into every dialect spoken in the Philippines, fenced in the display. Photos of the optimistic young Filipinos who had responded to the ads for international job opportunities and disappeared lined the bottom of the board.

The connection had shown up on Copley’s board. The ringleader wasn’t the one they’d first suspected. But the same man showed up in the photos with the suspected ringleader, often enough they decided to chase him down. That flushed out the human trafficking ring. Two years of painstaking work later, the result was a dozen arrests, information sent all over the Pacific to identify the second tier bosses, and an entire hotel full of frightened young Filipino women who were no longer on their way to lives of servitude in China.

Plus a team of mercenaries to pay off.

The Indonesian handler opened the door and nodded Booker into Copley’s office. The man was maybe in his early forties, with Northern European coloring and a quiet, resigned attitude that made Copley wonder why he’d chosen this line of work. His team was small, but they came highly recommended.

The raid had been quite bloody, with many of the guards killed. About half died of gunshot wounds; the others had been stabbed or slashed. The medical examiner counted six different types of blades that caused those wounds. Copley had gotten a report. It took a lot of training to inflict a mortal wound with a knife on the first attempt. 

The ship sunk in a fiery explosion after the victims had been evacuated. Someone on Booker’s team liked explosives and had a flair for the dramatic. Photos of the explosion and flames were on every news website in Indonesia and the Philippines, along with quotes from family members of the victims expressing their joy and relief to have their sisters/aunts/cousins returned to them.

“How’s your team?” Copley asked.

“No injuries,” Booker replied. 

“Rather miraculous, considering.”

Booker laughed, a derisive nasal snort. “You have no idea.”

Copley paused at that, the next comment about payment pushed aside when his investigator instincts rose to the surface at Booker’s cryptic comment. All the stab wounds meant close quarters hand to hand combat. How had Booker’s team escaped injury?

“You must have an impressive training regimen.”

“We get by.”

“Been together a long time?”

“You really have no idea.”

“Join me for a cup of coffee?”

Booker shrugged and seated himself.

In his years in the CIA, Copley had learned that sometimes people with secrets are dying to share those secrets. Criminals want you to know how clever they are. Corrupt politicians want to tell you why their motives are pure. Traitors want you to understand that they were working towards some greater good. Mercenaries want to brag about their tricks.

Copley nursed that cup of coffee for half an hour, listening to Booker tell carefully anonymized stories about previous jobs they’d done. He referred to someone else as the boss, which surprised Copley. It surprised him even more when Booker slipped and said ‘she.’ Listening to what Booker didn’t say, Copley heard jealousy about a couple team members, and conflicted feelings about the boss. This was a man who felt alienated from his team, an outsider and interloper. He’d joined the team because he hadn’t had a choice and he remained loyal because he didn’t have any options. 

Copley also heard hints of a secret that maybe shouldn’t be a secret anymore. Booker could be turned by a skillful handler. The ones who felt alienated and unappreciated were just waiting to find someone who did appreciate them, who stroked their egos and told them they needed to level the playing field with their colleagues, and betrayal might be the right way to do it. Copley didn’t know if Booker’s secret was worth knowing, but going fishing was part of his job.

“Listen to me run off at the mouth,” Booker finally said, setting down his coffee cup and standing up. “I don’t mean to waste your time.”

“It wasn’t a waste of time. I respect a man of your abilities.”

“Payment goes here.” Booker set a folded paper on Copley’s desk. 

It would have bank account numbers and routing instructions. Copley didn’t pick it up, just nodded.

“Is this how you do your investigations?” Booker asked, going over to look closely at Copley’s board.

“I find when I spread out all the clues, the patterns become obvious. Secrets aren’t really secret - they just require someone to spot a pattern that’s out in the open for anyone to find if they know what they’re looking for,” Copley said.

“You think you can do that, huh?”

“I know I can. Of course, now that this secret is done and gone, I’ll need a topic for a new board.” Fishing, he was fishing.

“Yep, guess you will. They’ll reassign you soon?”

“Yes, I’ll stay in the Pacific region, do some cleanup on this job. Would you want to stay in contact? Your team does good work. It might be beneficial for both of us if I had a way to contact you directly.” Bait on the hook.

“We don’t do repeats.”

Well, that was interesting. “What are you going to do once you’ve worked for everyone? Retire?” Copley laughed to show he was just making an idle joke.

“We don’t retire either.”

Booker was hinting at something. Copley was itching to open a file on his computer. A female boss, two teammates he quietly resented, no repeat jobs, no retirement, no injuries, blades as often as guns, lethal close quarters combat, stable team membership, no real choice about joining up, jobs focused on justice more than money. Clues, no pattern that they fit into yet, but there were clues.

“How about I give you a way to contact me. You don’t have to use it, but have it just in case. You’re a talented man and I could learn a lot from you, even if you never take an assignment from us again. If you get a job offer from someone you’re not sure of, I’ve got some resources. I could help you vet a source. I owe you a favor, and I always pay my debts.” Copley cast the line.

Booker took the card Copley offered and pocketed it. “Maybe.”

The hook wasn’t set yet. 

But it would be.

* * *

**Chongsong, North Korea to Sibu, Malaysia, 7 years ago**

The raid went wrong at the last minute. Someone tipped off the Korean People’s Army about the presence of armed and illegal foreigners, and they’d ended up fighting their way out of Chongsong. The hostages were on the plane headed for Vietnam before the shooting broke out. In the end, they escaped into China by sheer dumb luck; the North Korean forces waited for orders and that gave the four of them a head start. They didn’t work in China very often. Without contacts, it took a week to find a way to Russia and then to the Sea of Japan and finally to Wakkanai. From there, the group split up to lie low and wait for the North Korean accusation of spies and illegal raids by the United States to die down.

It wasn’t a U.S. job actually; they’d been hired by Asia Commercial Bank out of Ho Chi Minh City to rescue hostages kidnapped by a North Korean corporation who wanted leverage over some hot new tech invention that would probably be obsolete in two years. Still, government attention was something they wanted to avoid.

Joe and Nicky headed east to Hawaii. Booker took one look at Andy’s eyes and changed their tickets to Vietnam for Malaysia instead. If Andy noticed, she didn’t say anything.

Booker got them to Sibu, a port city with enough foreigners that they wouldn’t stand out too much, but small enough to avoid the surveillance that saturated big cities anymore. That’s when Andy fell to pieces.

“It was like seeing a ghost, Book. You saw her.” 

In almost two centuries, Booker could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Andy lose it, and the last time was in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen. He knelt down and unlaced her boots for her, marveling that she was allowing him to take care of her. After peeling out of his own boots, he sat next to her on the bed of the impersonal, cheap hotel room and put an arm around her shoulders. Andy came willingly into his arms and let him hold her. She’d hugged him before, plenty of times, the entire team was pretty affectionate, but never when they were alone, and never when she so desperately needed him.

“She looked just like her,” Andy repeated.

“I’ve never actually seen Quynh,” Booker said. “Just in the dreams and . . .” He stopped himself from saying anything more. The rest of the team didn’t dream about Quynh, and he didn’t think they needed detailed descriptions of how she felt and looked after centuries in the tiny prison at the bottom of the ocean. The person that Booker saw in his dreams didn’t look anything like the beautiful Vietnamese woman who had shocked Andy.

Andy’s body started to shake, and Booker realized she was crying. He shifted them around, laid down on the scratchy duvet and pulled Andy down to lie next to him. She curled up, head on his shoulder and bent knees in his belly, and sobbed. Booker stroked her hair and let a few tears of his own leak out. 

Andy had scared the hell out of the hostage they’d rescued, hugging her and speaking to her in a language that probably only Andy and Quynh could still understand. Nicky had intervened, reassuring the hostage in heavily accented, modern Vietnamese and transferring Andy’s death grip to Joe. Joe shepherded Andy until she’d snapped out of it enough to fight again. Her breakdown slowed their escape and she knew it.

There was nothing to say to comfort her. Sometimes Booker wondered what their team would have been like if Quynh was still with them. Joe and Nicky. Andy and Quynh. And Booker still alone. The team pretty much looked like that now; it’s just that Quynh was a ghost. 

He was enough of a dick to hope that if Andy could grieve and release Quynh, there might be room in her heart for him. Did that make him a dick? He wanted what Joe and Nicky had, and Andy was his only option. She was a very self-contained woman, though. She wasn’t going to need him the way Nicky needed Joe, and vice versa. She wasn’t going to need him the way she’d needed Quynh. She wasn’t going to love him the way he wanted her to. Booker wasn’t some sappy romantic, but it was hard to stare down the barrel of eternity with Joe and Nicky constantly making heart eyes at each other and not wish that he had that too. 

Andy was strong and beautiful and way too good for him. He knew that, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from tightening his arms around her and burying his face in her hair, pretending that the reason she was pressed in so close was because she loved him and wanted him, not because she needed someone to hold her while she cried because someone had reminded her of her true love.

“Sorry, Book,” Andy gasped out.

“No, no, you don’t go anywhere,” Booker said, resisting when Andy tried to pull away from him. “I’ll hold you as long as you need.”

“I’m not soaking through your shirt already?” Andy said with a watery laugh, her fingers rubbing where her tears had dampened Booker’s shirt. She stopped trying to pull away and relaxed against him again.

“I don’t mind,” Booker said.

“You’re always here for me, Book. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Andy said with a sigh.

“You’re never going to find out. I’m always here for you.”

Andy stretched out, settling in against him, and rested her palm on his chest, her cheek pillowed in the hollow of his collarbone. He could feel her breath warming the damp spot on his shirt, stirring his blood. 

Yes, he was hard. No, he wasn’t going to do anything about it.

“I don’t believe in an afterlife, Book. After I die, it’s just over. It’s all just over and I don’t need to know anything, or remember anything. I want it to be over.”

“You’re not gonna die, Andy.” 

“Everyone dies. Lykon died after just a few centuries. I wish Quynh could die so her suffering could end. I’m just so tired, Book. So tired. I’m the oldest, and some days I’m afraid this is never going to end. You’ll all die and leave me, and I’ll end up the way I started - totally alone. I want to die before anyone else does.”

Booker made comforting noises, and rubbed her back. After a while, she dozed off against him, her body going limp and her breathing evening out. Booker didn’t want to sleep; he wanted to savor every minute of this. Joe and Nicky slept in each others’ arms every night for a thousand years, and he got one night. 

He’d take it.

* * *

**North America, 5 years ago**

“Hey, I’m calling in a favor. Where you at?” Booker asked.

“Akron, Ohio,” Copley replied.

Booker wondered when the CIA opened a headquarters in Akron, Ohio.

“I’m on home leave. My wife is sick.”

“Oh. Is this a bad time?”

“You may as well give me something else to think about.” Copley gave him an address.

Booker broke the burner phone and threw away the pieces, then bought a plane ticket to Akron. This latest job they’d been offered seemed fishy, and Booker insisted on taking a week to vet their contact. Besides, he liked Copley. They’d talked several times since Surabaya. Not really shop talk, other than the occasional story, but it was pleasant to have someone else to talk to, someone outside the team.

The last time they’d met for coffee, in Brussels, Booker had gone so far as to admit he was interested in a lady who wasn’t interested in him. He didn’t tell Copley it was his boss. Copley told him the story of how he met his own wife, and the years it had taken him to move them from friends to lovers. Booker had felt something warm and bubbly while listening to Copley. It took him days to identify the feeling as hope. Stupid, misplaced, illogical hope, because Andy wasn’t a bit like Raya, but it was a good feeling even if it was delusional.

The safehouse outside Alberta was a tumbledown farmhouse. The firepit and cooking tripod was in the backyard. Booker found Nicky stirring stew over a small fire. They all took turns cooking, but everyone liked Nicky’s turn the best.

“I’m checking out this next job. I’ve gotta go to Akron. It shouldn’t be more than a couple days.”

“Do you want to eat first? The potatoes are almost done.”

“Yeah, sure.” Booker hooked the water pot out of the fire and poured it into the teapot to steep while Nicky finished working his magic with the potatoes in the stew. He’d offered to hook up the generator, but none of them minded cooking over a fire. It was summer, so it stayed light far into the evening this far north. They didn’t really need electricity.

Joe and Andy showed up with ceramic dishes. Nicky ladled out stew and Booker poured tea. The four of them ate together, the way they had ten thousand times over the past two hundred years. Booker didn’t know why it felt different this time, lighter and easier somehow. Andy was her usual no-nonsense self. Joe laughed at his own jokes and they all joined in because Joe laughing was funnier than anything he said. Nicky asked about Booker’s trip.

“You remember the last job in Colombia. I’m getting that vibe again. I want to check out our contact, make sure he’s not feeding me a line,” Booker said.

“Yeah, that fucking job in Colombia pissed me off. Those drug cartels.” Andy shook her head. “There aren’t good guys or bad guys. I wish I could just airlift the civilians out of there.”

“It was a job. Pay was good,” Joe said. “We stopped some people from getting killed.”

“I’m not saying anyone deserved to die. Hell, I’m not judge, jury and god. I just don’t want another job where we find out everyone’s the bad guy,” said Andy.

“Colombia is a difficult place to try and help,” Nicky said.

“Helping doesn’t seem to be helping anymore,” Andy said. “Nothing we do makes any difference. I need a career change.”

“I’ll find us a good job, Andy. If this one isn’t it, I’ll turn it down,” Booker said. 

“Thanks, Book,” Andy said, with that wry smile that she only ever gave him. 

She never smiled at Joe and Nicky like that. Booker liked to think it meant Andy trusted him, because he only ever got that smile after promising to do something Andy wanted. Booker would have taken on more mercenary jobs, and fuck the morality of it all, but trying to do some good in the world kept Andy’s spirits up.

He smiled back at her.

* * *

Booker was used to people getting older, but it still surprised him to see the careworn lines around Copley’s eyes. 

“You said your wife is sick?” Booker asked. Booker liked Copley’s wife, though he had never met her, because she had eventually let Copley woo her and had fallen in love with him. Women like that should live very long lives with the men who loved them.

“We got the diagnosis a month ago. ALS disease,” Copley said quietly.

“I’m going to excuse myself to the restroom, and google that,” Booker said.

Copley waved him back into his seat. “ALS is a motor neuron disease. She’s going to lose all voluntary muscle control, while retaining all her mental faculties. Eventually she’ll suffocate when the muscles she uses for breathing stop working. She’ll be entirely aware of what’s happening to her, all the way to the end.”

“Oh my God.”

Copley laughed, short and bitter. “I’m not sure he has much to do with it.”

“Is there treatment? A cure?”

“They can slow it down a bit with medications, but no, no treatment or cure. She probably has four or five years until she . . .” Copley stopped talking and shrugged.

Booker had developed a certain level of callousness in the past two hundred years. He needed it to survive. The only people who could get under that callousness and make him care were Andy and Copley. Andy because he loved her, and Copley because he gave him hope. 

“I guess it’s totally meaningless to offer to help, but I wish there was something I could do.”

“I’ll take a miracle if you’re offering,” Copley said with a broken laugh. “I just need something that stops death in its tracks.”

Something snapped in Booker’s mind, and for one instant he was in that hospital with his son screaming at him that he could help if he wanted to, his face twisted with hatred and accusation. He felt his heart lurch and the void open up. Then the present snapped back into place. Booker shook his head sympathetically and didn’t say anything inappropriate like, ‘I’ve got what you need but I can’t help you at all. Go ahead and hate me like everyone I’ve ever loved.’

Copley put his hands to his face and blew out a deep breath. “But we’re not here to talk about me. What have you got?”

Booker explained the job and his misgivings about the guy who contacted him. 

“This doesn’t sound like a double cross,” Copley said.

“No, not a double cross. But we might be stepping into a situation where we’re not actually, you know, doing some good. We don’t want to get involved in a drug lord turf war or help some political faction oppress dissidents. Sometimes I’m not sure the story we get is the true story.”

Copley huffed out a laugh. “Your team really does have a conscience. I’ve noticed that about the stories you tell. You’re a bloodthirsty bunch of mercenaries trying to act like Robin Hood.”

“Yeah, I heard he was a pretty decent guy.”

“Is this your boss’s priority?”

“She’s got a heart and soul, my boss,” Booker said with a smile.

Copley raised an eyebrow with a smile and Booker realized he’d put the pieces together. Copley knew Booker was in love with his boss. 

And he was fine with that. 

That’s what felt different about eating stew around the fire with his team, knowing he was on his way to see Copley. He knew he was going to talk to someone who knew he was in love with Andy, and knew he resented Joe and Nicky. Copley could be totally in Booker’s corner about all of it, because he didn’t know anyone else on the team.

Booker had a friend.

* * *

**Montereale, Italy, 3 years ago**

Andy left Montereale about a week ago. Usually, once Andy took off, Booker left too. Joe and Nicky never split up. Over the past few years, Booker had gotten Andy to stay with him more often than not, but she didn’t say yes every time. Instead of leaving immediately after Andy, he spent an extra few days waiting for the payment from this latest job to clear the Cayman Islands account. He split the payment between their Swiss bank account and the accounts they had set up in the United States.

That was when four earthquakes struck central Italy in one day.

The first couple days after the quakes, he and Joe and Nicky pitched in with everyone else, shoveling snow and passing along rumors about when the electricity would be restored. Once the initial danger passed, the official rescue teams turned down their help. Everyone wanted to help and the rescue teams and government were overwhelmed.

Booker, Joe and Nicky ended up in a large tent erected in a sports arena, assigned to three cots, huddled into coats and blankets with everyone else. Once Booker got word to Andy that they were fine, there was nothing to do but wait out the power outage and hope the train station and airport opened back up soon.

Joe gave Booker the salami stick from his Red Cross food package. Sometimes Joe ate halal and sometimes he didn’t. Booker didn’t try to keep track. Or maybe he just didn’t like salami. Booker took the salami and offered Joe the vacuum-packed shelf-stable cheese cubes in exchange. Nicky munched crackers. The tense boredom of being in a national emergency really got to you after a while. The news and gossip created a sense of danger and urgency, which ramped up the adrenaline, and then there was nothing to do but sit on a cot and eat a salami stick. Booker wanted to go dig someone out of rubble, or work on a broken water main, or even just push a cart around handing out Red Cross food packages.

A man wearing a Red Cross vest shouted for their attention and then asked, “Does anyone here have emergency medical training?”

Nicky was up and gone so fast that Booker didn’t even get a chance to ask him if he could have the rest of his food package. 

“Where are you two headed after we get out of here?” Booker asked Joe in Italian.

“The UAE. I’m going to renew my firefighter certifications and brush up on my Arabic. The youngsters are starting to make fun of my accent again,” Joe replied, rifling through Nicky’s food package and then folding it up and slipping it under the blanket. 

Joe was vain about accents. 

“Nicky will always speak more languages than you,” Booker said.

“Nicky can say, ‘how can I help you’ in every language on the planet and understand the answer,” Joe agreed with a proud grin.

“There’s more than one way to help people,” Booker said, flattening out the foil of his food package just to have something to do with his hands.

“Allah give me strength,” Joe said to the ceiling. “Now what are you up to?” 

“Nothing, fuck off, why are you so suspicious whenever I try to bring up some options?” Booker demanded.

“I’m suspicious because you’ve said that before.”

“Nicky isn’t suspicious.”

“Nicky gives people the benefit of the doubt too many times.”

“Trouble in paradise? I didn’t think you two ever disagreed,” Booker shot back.

“That’s not what we’re talking about.”

“Tell me, Joe, what are we talking about? All I said is that there’s more than one way to help people,” Booker said. He leaned his elbows on his knees.

“That was the argument you made about,” Joe glanced around to see who might be listening to them, and then switched into Arabic, “about Berlin.”

Booker could understand Arabic, but not speak it, so he replied in French. “What happened wasn’t my fault.”

Joe stared at him like he was this creepy piece of shit who wasn’t even good enough to stick to the bottom of Joe’s shoe. Damn, he was so fucking sick of their condescension. Nicky was only nice to him when Joe gave him permission and Joe was never going to get over what happened in Berlin. Everyone makes a mistake once in a while. He was willing to bet that even the golden boys had fucked up once or twice in the past millennium.

“It was your fault it happened at all,” Joe said flatly. “Look, we never told Andy about it . . .”  
“And you won’t,” Booker shouted, and then lowered his voice again. “You both promised you wouldn’t.”

“Are you going to do something like that again? What are you thinking? It’s not good enough to be on the team, you gotta go find some other way to save humanity?”

“I love the team.”

“You love Andy.”

“Fuck you, man!” Booker got to his feet, furious. No one was supposed to know that, no one but Copley. Booker needed his feelings for Andy to stay a secret, to stay safe and protected where he never had to compare them to what Joe and Nicky had and admit he was living on rags and dirt because that’s all he had.

Joe had done that thing where he went really quiet and calm. It creeped out Booker. If you’re angry, fucking act like it. Don’t bottle it all up or pretend it’s not there.

“Look, we’re all a little tense after a job, and the earthquake didn’t help. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Joe said.

Booker clenched his jaw and looked away. Did he even hear how condescending he was?

“If you’ve got some other options for the team, let’s talk them out as a team. What other ways do you want to help people?”

“Nothing you’d be interested in,” Booker said tightly. “Drop it.”

Joe dropped it.

* * *

**Cairo, Egypt, 3 years ago**

When the four of them were together, everything was fine. Just like old times. They joked around -- Nicky and Booker set friendly bets, Booker said cynical things and pretended he didn’t mean them, Andy hugged everyone, Booker joked with Andy about her sex life to try and find out if she’d slept with any men since losing Quynh, Joe and Nicky proclaimed their undying love for each other whenever they could fit it into the conversation, they talked over plans, had each others’ backs, bought new weapons and found jobs. 

The thing that was different was that Booker found ways to never be around Joe and Nicky unless Andy was there too. If Andy said she was leaving, Booker found a way to leave first. 

It was dumb of him to think Andy wouldn’t notice.

“What’s going on, Book?”

They were on their way to the train station in Cairo. Andy had said she needed to talk to one of their sources in Marrakesh and so Booker announced an errand in Tripoli. 

Booker raised his eyebrows in a question.

Andy sighed. “Do I have to say it?”

“Come on, Andy, you know they can get to be a little much. If I need a break, I need a break,” Booker protested with a self-deprecating laugh. 

“Anything I should know about?”

“No.”

“Nothing like 1965 with those British doctors who were trying to combine human and animal cells?”

“Shit, Andy, no. I told you that was a one-off. It was a bad idea. You stopped me. End of story.”

“Just checking.”

They walked in silence for a minute.

“You didn’t tell Joe and Nicky about that, did you?”

“No, I told you I wouldn’t. Why do you ask?”

Booker shrugged.

“Did something happen between you and Joe?”

Booker shrugged again. “Joe’s touchy about shit he doesn’t need to be touchy about, that’s all.”

“Anything that’s going to cause the team problems?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re not sick of me.”

“Never.”

He made her laugh.

They got a sleeper car with bunks too narrow to fit two people. Not that Andy had slept with him since that night in Sibu four years ago (and when he said she slept with him, he meant that literally and not as a euphemism), so he wasn’t expecting anything tonight either. 

“I’ll take the top bunk,” Booker said.

“Yeah,” Andy said, dropping down onto the bottom bunk and tucking her feet up. She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked at him.

That looked like an invitation to him. Booker sat down next to her and put a friendly arm around her shoulders. She leaned in, her head on his shoulder. The rocking movement of the train added some pleasant motion to the embrace. He wished he could lie down with her on top of him and run his hands all over her body while the train rocked along with them. If only he dared to tip up her chin and kiss her on the mouth like a lover, rather than on the cheek as a friend. What if he found out that she’d been yearning after him for years as well? 

Sweet, sweet fantasy. It was better than reality. This fantasy might be all he ever had, and he wouldn’t risk it for anything, not even for Andy.

“You still okay with the team and the jobs, Book?”

Had Joe said something to Andy? If he had, if he’d even hinted that Booker might do something to disappoint Andy, Booker would make him pay. Somehow.

“You guys are all I’ve got,” Booker replied. An answer without really being an answer. He wasn’t going to lie to Andy.

“That gets a little desperate after a while, doesn’t it?” Andy whispered.

“We’re all you’ve got too. You and me.” That was the closest he would ever come to hinting that he and Andy should be a couple like Joe and Nicky. Before she could say something to turn him down, he added, “We’ve got the team and that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “Yeah, that’s right. That’s all we need.”

“Forever and ever,” Booker said.

“I’m not sure if that’s a promise or a threat, Book,” Andy said with a chuckle.

“When you live this long, they sound the same.”

“Do you ever wonder?” Andy trailed off.

Booker waited silently.

“Do you ever wonder when this will all be over? This life, this immortality, whatever weird gift the universe gave us? Or maybe it’s a curse. It feels more like a curse anymore.”

“Yeah, this isn’t something I would have chosen.”

“And yet you’re still so young. Compared to me, anyway.”

“You’ll outlast us all, boss.”

“Please, no. Whatever deity might exist, say it isn’t so!”

“Andy.” Booker put a hand to her cheek. It could be friendly, it could be more. “Do you really want it to be over?”

“I’ll never get Quynh back. Yeah, I want it to be over.”

That was his answer. Andy would always belong with Quynh. Joe would always belong with Nicky. And he would always be on his own.

Booker brushed the hair off Andy’s forehead and briefly pressed his lips there. “Get some sleep, boss.”

He climbed up to his own bunk and settled in, thinking about how if he could never have Andy for his own, he should find a way to get her what she really wanted.

* * *

**London, England, 6 months ago**

“I don’t understand why you need me as a go-between,” Copley said. He set down his brandy and leaned his elbows on his knees.

Booker refilled his glass for the third time and settled deeper into Copley’s couch. “I need some bargaining power, and once I walk into a doctor’s office, I’m just a lab rat. You understand more medical shit than I do.” Booker waved a hand in the direction of Copley’s research board about ALS that leaned against a wall. The main research board had been covered with the immortals for over a year now. “Will they find out why we can't stay dead? I’m not going to convince some doctor that I can’t die just so he can take blood samples.”

“Your team could be the key to ending disease,” Copley said. That was what Booker had originally said to him after Raya died and he was listening to Booker say unbelievable things.

“Well, yeah, but that’s kind of a side effect. There’s all this new science about DNA and genetics. I don’t want them to just cure stuff. I want them to find out why we can’t die. I want them to find a way to change it back.” Booker looked at him with watery eyes.

Copley had been spending a lot more time with Booker over the past year and a half, and he’d noticed that Booker had a chronic case of self-pity. It got tiresome, honestly, but he wasn’t going to lecture Booker about his attitude and risk driving him off. He’d almost lost Booker the time Copley suggested that he talk to his team about exposing their secret and let them make this decision together.

“I don’t want to risk the doctors keeping me if they’re not going to do what I want. I need you to talk to them and make sure they’ll study the immortality and how to end it. I won’t go in without a guarantee of that,” Booker said.

“As a side effect, they’ll probably learn how to cure disease,” Copley insisted. This point was important to him. He wasn’t Booker’s hired messenger; he had scruples about what they were doing.

“That’s fine.” Booker poured more brandy into his glass.

“Alright. I’ve got a contact at Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris,” Copley started.

“No, no, no! You have to use Merrick Pharmaceuticals. They’re based in London,” Booker said.

“Why Merrick?” 

Booker shrugged nonchalantly. “I just think they’ll believe you faster.”

Copley drew breath to ask why and then decided that Booker would lie to him anyway. “Fine, I’ll call Merrick.”

* * *

Copley didn’t have a contact at Merrick, so he had to work through regular channels. The day he presented himself at the front desk with a laptop full of information, he fully expected to be talking to a low-ranking doctor, maybe two of them if someone’s friend was bored. Instead, an assistant escorted him to a conference room where he met Dr. Meta Kozak, head of research, and Steven Merrick himself.

Concealing his surprise, Copley opened his laptop and began with his introduction, a plea to hear him out before deciding that what he said was ludicrous. He went through the entire presentation with photos and newspaper articles, stopping frequently to ask if either of them had questions about the unbelievable things he was saying. They never had questions. Copley figured they were tolerating him politely and would get rid of him as soon as they could. Some CEOs wouldn’t have bothered hearing him out. Copley appreciated their courtesy.

He finished his presentation with rhetorical questions about finding out why these people couldn’t die, listing the possible benefits to the human race of studying their ability to heal from any injury and never sicken from disease. He hadn’t actually expected to get this far into the presentation to a silent audience, so he was left a little at loose ends when he finished up with an invitation to believe him despite how outlandish it all seemed.

Merrick set down the pen he’d been toying with through most of Copley’s presentation and leaned forward. “You’ve convinced me that you’ve found evidence that there are immortals among us. The real question is, how do I know that you’re actually in contact with these people?”

* * *

The killbox with a camera was Merrick’s idea. The mercs with machine guns were a team that Copley worked with when he was in the CIA. Setting them up like that painted a target on his back, so he was partly relieved when Booker’s team killed every one of them. He was also partly horrified. Still, he had Raya’s picture to steel him against too much regret. The goal was the end of disease. He balanced how many lives they could save against the necessity of lives lost and forged ahead.

The rage on Andromache’s face when she swung the labrys at the camera unsettled him more than all those dead mercs. Booker was so sure that Andromache wanted a way to end the immortality that Copley halfway expected her to be relieved that they’d been caught. Perhaps it was just the heat of the moment?

Then he saw what she did to Keane’s men in the Goussainville church. After that, he couldn’t persuade himself that Andromache secretly approved of what Booker was doing. Still, he was doing this for Raya more than for Booker. He would have killed any number of people to save Raya’s life. This was about Raya. 

Copley’s weakening resolve went down in the one-two punch of Joe and Nicky exclaiming about the nice plane and tv and champagne, and Merrick’s greedy excitement about making money off them. It turned out that he was a mercenary too. He hadn’t known that about himself.

If only two out of the four were to be captured, it should have been Booker and Andromache, since those were the ones who wanted to end the immortality. It was unfortunate that Keane’s men seized Joe and Nicky. Still, despite the queasiness of his conscience, there was no turning back now. 

His resolve lasted until he heard Andromache’s guttural cries of rage at Booker’s betrayal and realized the immortality had ended and she could die. 

Abruptly, it wasn’t about Raya anymore.


	5. On the Drive

Once Iselda Merrick was in her office with the door locked, she slit open the envelope with its handwritten address that she had retrieved from the London post office box. Their computer files were being corrupted and deleted. Until their IT security could ferret out the problem and deal with it, everything to do with the JoNi cells went through the post office box. 

The letter was from the guard who was tailing Meta Kozak. He wrote that he had tracked her to Frankfurt. She’d stayed at someone’s home for a week, then returned to her father’s clinic. 

Iselda frowned. Dr. Kozak had no reason to travel to Germany, not with everything going on right now. She wrote back to the guard, instructing him to find out everything he could about the people she had stayed with, and addressed it back to the post office box.

Her phone chimed, the encrypted phone they used for voice calls only. 

“What’s the update?” Iselda asked.

“The group is back together. They’re all in Kyiv now,” Bridger reported. 

This was the news Iselda had been waiting for. “How long to get your forces into position?”

“Twenty-four hours.”

“Why so long?”

“It hasn’t been easy hiring a team.”

“Why?” Iselda demanded.

“Word got around about the slaughter of the security forces at your company. The speculation is you wouldn’t fund decent weapons and equipment. No one wants to do security for Merrick Pharma anymore. I’m finding as many people as I can, but we can’t get nearly as many people as I want. We want to send overwhelming force against these guys, and we just can’t get that many people,” Bridger said.

Iselda cut off his babble. “Have you seen photos? Are these the assassins who killed my son?”

“Yes, mostly.”

“Explain.”

“There was a white man with them last time. We haven’t gotten a visual on him yet. I’m sure he’s with the group somewhere.”

“Fine. I don’t like the delay. You’ve had a month.”

“Which is the only reason I’ve got as many people as I do. The lockdown locations are ready. The timing won’t compromise the mission. The specimen box is still in P.O. Box 405223. They won’t leave Kyiv without it,” Bridger said.

In Dr. Kozak’s debrief, she had theorized that one of the reasons the escape was successful is that they kept all the tissue donors together. She said that the original contact, James Copley, suggested that the group would be more cooperative if they weren’t separated. That had been a mistake. This time, the five tissue donors would be separated immediately, and taken to different locations, one would be held at the Kozaks’ clinic, two would be sent to different locations in China, one to Germany and one to the UK. 

“Twenty-four hours, no more. Get to work,” Iselda said.

* * *

Once they realized they would be staying in Kyiv longer than a month, Joe and Nicky found an apartment on the Left Bank and moved out of the hotel. It had been built during the Soviet era, a two room furnished apartment with a babushka landlord who gave them recipes and scolded them when they let the frost build up in the freezer. Joe suspected they could paint the rest of the apartment bright purple and fill it with tarantulas, and Baba wouldn’t care as long as the kitchen was clean.

They spent a couple of weeks intensively refreshing their Ukrainian language skills and telling the neighbors they had been living in Kyiv for several years, and recently moved from across town. People weren’t nearly as curious if you had just moved to a different neighborhood rather than coming from a different country. 

Life hit a rhythm and they were settling in when the text message announced that Andy, Nile and Copley would arrive the next day.

Joe went to buy cots and Nicky went to the grocer. Late that evening they were moving their landlord’s bulky furniture to make room for everyone and cheerfully speculating about what they would do once they were all together again.

“It’s a job, Joe, not a holiday.”

“Nile needs to play the tourist, Nicky, it’s part of her education. Plus, it’s easier to learn a language if you know something about the people and their history.”

Nicky gave him that slow smile that meant that he loved Joe’s enthusiasm but would be more cautious. Joe gave the heavy armchair one last shove, looped an arm around Nicky’s waist, and dropped them both into the armchair. “You are as excited as I am to get to know Nile.”

Nicky’s answer was delayed by a kiss, his hand fingering one of Joe’s black curls.

“She is brave and honorable,” Nicky said at last, looking down into Joe’s eyes. 

“Unlike our last immortal,” Joe prompted him. Nicky didn’t like to say unkind things, but they needed to talk this out. Their little team couldn’t afford to misjudge anyone else. He held Nicky’s gaze until Nicky sighed and leaned back, pulling Joe along to rest his head against Nicky’s chest.

“We were not wrong to give him a chance.”

“Immortality doesn’t change a character; it just gives it time to expose itself. We gave him too many chances.” Joe had thought about this in great detail over the past several weeks. They had thought they were being kind. Instead, they were allowing Booker the time and space to betray them. In the end, that was not kindness, not for any of them.

“But what were we supposed to do, Joe? We pretended to believe his lies because we wanted to believe he was the man he wished he was too. The truth,” Nicky paused, wrapping a curl around his little finger, “What could we have done if we’d confronted him about his lies?”

“Not trusted him to find us jobs,” Joe replied. He settled a hand underneath Nicky’s shirt, against bare skin.

When they found Booker and explained immortality to him years after the dreams began, Joe and Nicky assumed he’d been captured and hung by the Russians. Booker said he was weak with starvation when Russian troops attacked them. Russian troops weren’t attacking French troops so much as destroying the food as they retreated so Napoleon’s forces would starve to death, but of course there would still be skirmishes. Booker told them he joined Napoleon to curry political favor to save his son from prison. It was a good story. 

Andy was skeptical. She tracked down Booker’s regiment, learned more of his history, and then shared it with Joe and Nicky years later, when they were coming to rely on Booker’s talents more and more. As literacy spread, letters and documents were increasingly being used for identification and travel in the more well-settled areas of Europe. Money was more and more of a convenience, rather than bartering for what they needed. Booker helped so much with all of that. He took it over, really, and that’s when Andy told them what she had learned.

“He wasn’t captured by the Russians. He was hung for desertion by his own regiment,” Andy said.

“He deserted from a war against his principles. This reflects well on him,” Nicky said.

“Funny he didn’t tell us that, though,” Joe said.

“There’s more. He was only in Napoleon’s army as the alternative to staying in jail. For forgery. He’d been convicted of forging bank notes and something about falsifying business documents. His business partners pressed charges,” Andy said.

“He said that was his son,” Nicky said.

“It was him,” Andy replied.

Then they’d all thought about it. Thought about ways to excuse it. To point out that he wasn’t a violent criminal. Perhaps poverty and desperation had forced him into cheating his partners to save his family from starvation and ruin. Booker’s family was comfortably well-off, but perhaps they used to be poor, and Booker saved them, they speculated. Perhaps he sacrificed himself for their good. Then when the authorities gave him the choice between the army and prison, which one of them would have chosen differently than Booker? 

The desertion could be explained away as an escape attempt. They had all deserted from an army at some point in the past centuries when they felt their job was done. Yes, they could understand Booker’s feelings and choices. Yes, Booker was trustworthy. No, they didn’t need to confront Booker about the lies and half-truths he had told them. He probably worried they would think less of him if he told the truth. He was mistaken, but there was no need to bring up painful past events. That was all in the past and it could stay there. They would give Booker a clean slate.

“And now we’re trusting Copley, the man Booker partnered with to betray us,” Joe said.

“Copley’s regret for his actions is sincere. We all heard him. Booker never expressed regret, Joe, only that we must understand why he did it,” Nicky replied.

“Between Booker and Copley, I trust Copley more, but that doesn’t mean I trust him entirely,” Joe said.

“We’ll see what he has to say,” Nicky said.

“We could leave the tissue specimen box with the Blessed Mary Medical Clinic,” Joe said. “Walk away and forget it.”

Nicky put both hands to Joe’s face and stroked his cheekbones. “You say that only because you think that is what I want.”

“I say that because Copley might set us up. What if the safest thing we can do is to leave the tissue specimens wherever they are, and get far away from Copley? We could find our own jobs,” Joe said. “Or why do we need jobs at all? It was our heroism that drew Copley’s attention to us. We should lay low for a couple of decades at least. I’ll go back to working as a firefighter; you be the paramedic again.”

“Working as a firefighter is how you plan to not draw attention to your heroics?” Nicky said, with a smile that spread all the way from his cheeks and lips to his eyes.

Joe threw back his head and laughed.

* * *

Nicky kept moving their landlord’s lace curtains to check the street.

Joe sent a text, then told Nicky, “They won’t be here for another thirty minutes.”

Nicky nodded and kept fidgeting. Joe propped his head on his hand and watched him. One of the many things he loved about Nicky was the way he never pretended that he wasn’t as excited as he was. He’d set out a tea tray, gone for fresh bread and cleaned the bathroom twice. For Nile, he’d bought several types of candy bars, because everyone knew young Americans loved candy bars. For Andy, he’d gotten mint tea. No baklava for this reunion, Joe had noticed, even though they knew of a bakery that sold it. Nothing special for Copley, but they did have a tray of cucumber sandwiches for everyone.

Joe got up and joined him in fidgeting, straightening the rugs on the wood floor and finally picking lint off the couch because there was nothing else to do.

At long last, there was a knock at the door, which Nicky opened before the second knock landed on the wood. He enveloped Andy in a hug, turning her in a half-circle to release her right into Joe’s embrace. Joe folded Andy in tight, holding on a bit longer because they’d never talked about her loss of immortality and suddenly he knew he might not be able to do this many more times. He let go and put a hand to Andy’s cheek, searching her face. She was happy to see them, but exhaustion and pain shadowed her eyes.

“It’s good to see you too, Nicky,” Nile said. The look she gave Joe over Nicky’s shoulder seemed to be asking how long Nicky was going to hang on to her.

Joe laughed and tugged Nicky’s arm until he let go, giving Nile a brief hug before waving her into the room and offering her a seat.

Copley followed, and got a handshake and a nod.

Their Baba landlord supplied them with only four matching teacups, so Joe kept the chipped ceramic mug for himself. He noticed that Nile set the teacup down without sipping, and didn’t bother adding sugar. She also didn’t pick up a candy bar from the cut glass bowl that Baba would probably rather they not use.

“Can I get you something else?” Joe asked.

“Do you have Coke?” Nile replied.

“Joe doesn’t like soda so I didn’t think to buy any,” Nicky said. “She’s American, Joe, we should have bought soda.” Nicky was concerned about his oversight. 

Joe stood up. “I’ll go find soda.”

“Guys! It’s not a big deal. I’m not gonna die if I can’t have a Coke.”

Nicky smiled slowly. Joe laughed out loud. Andy chuckled and shook her head.

“Oh,” said Nile with a sheepish grin.

“What about you?” Joe said to Copley. “Will you die if you can’t have a Coke?”

“I’m not that type of American,” Copley said. Whenever he smiled, he looked like he was afraid someone would yell at him for it.

“There are types?” Joe asked, looking at Nicky.

Nile picked up a cucumber sandwich. Nicky had spread soft cheese on rye bread with snips of fresh dill and thin-sliced cucumber. Joe looked from the cucumber sandwich platter to the candy bars and shrugged. Nile liked cucumbers more than chocolate. They would know for next time.

“Has there been any activity at P.O. Box 405233 at all?” Andy asked, taking a cucumber sandwich.

“None,” Nicky said. “We check six times a day. I smeared some wax over the corner last week, and it remains unbroken. The tracker we mailed to the box remained in the box until the battery died. No one checks the box.”

“They must have some kind of signal that lets someone know there’s something to pick up,” Joe said. “No signal means no pickup. We must have gotten here just after they picked up the specimen box.”

“Copley thinks he found the Blessed Mary Medical Clinic,” Andy said.

“Dr. Meta Kozak’s father runs the clinic. It’s near Borsa, Romania, about 80 kilometers outside the city. It’s a small, obscure clinic without much information online, but the family connection to Dr. Kozak convinces me that this is the clinic we’re searching for.”

“But you’re not sure,” Joe said.

“No, I can’t be sure. The last place the specimen box was scanned was when it arrived at the Kyiv post office. I’m guessing that if someone retrieved it, it went to this clinic, probably just to be held until someone can pick it up,” Copley said.

Oddly, Copley’s admission that he wasn’t sure eased some of Joe’s suspicions about him. Booker was always very sure about everything.

“This is an easy job,” Nicky said. “We go to the clinic, take the box, and leave. There can’t be security at a small medical clinic in the mountains. No one gets hurt. We don’t even have to take guns.”

“We’ll take guns,” Andy said.

“Of course,” Nicky replied immediately, “it was only a figure of speech.”

Nile snorted in laughter. Joe managed to catch her eye to wink at her.

“When do we leave, boss?” Joe asked.

“We’re taking a charter plane to L’viv, and then another charter to Chernivtsi. Then we’ll buy a couple trucks and drive over the border into Romania,” Andy said.

“Nice time of year for a drive in the mountains,” Joe observed.

“Why don’t we fly directly there?” Nicky asked.

Andy looked at Copley, and Copley answered. “Cost.”

“What do you mean, cost?” Joe said.

“He means that we didn’t get the bank account information from Booker before we banished him,” Nile said.

“We’ve got enough to get by until we can get another paying job,” Andy said. “But taking the long route on this case costs about a third as much as chartering a flight from Kyiv to Borsa.”

“He took all the money with him?” Joe demanded.

“He’s not spending it. It’s just that we don’t have access to the deep accounts. Copley’s working on it,” said Andy.

“I haven’t been able to give it my full attention, but I will as soon as we’ve gotten that box back,” Copley said.

Joe got to his feet so he could pace and pull his hair at the same time.

“Hey, Joe, don’t worry about it. Copley will get the money in time for my retirement party,” Andy said. 

They still hadn’t talked about Andy’s mortality. The suggestion that Andy sit this mission out died on his lips. He wanted to wrap Andy up in cotton wool and keep her safe, but she would hate the effort. 

Nicky’s indrawn breath, released without a word, let him know that Nicky had the same thought, and the same second thought.

Nile looked between the two of them and then picked up her cup of tea as the atmosphere in the room shifted from lighthearted to heavy.

“I’m fine, guys,” Andy said.

“Uh-huh,” Nile agreed.

Joe marveled at the ability of a young person to get so much disagreement into an affirmative noise.

“This mission won’t be dangerous,” Nicky said.

“I’d be coming along anyway,” Andy said with a tight smile.

“Yes, boss,” Nicky said.

That ended that foray into discussing the newest challenge facing the team. Joe wasn’t sure it was such a great idea to let that go, but Nicky was right. This mission wasn’t dangerous. If they had to force a discussion, better to wait until it mattered.

The conversation moved on to travel logistics and plans. Nile eventually unwrapped a Snickers bar, which made Nicky smile. 

Joe decided things were as smooth as they could be at this point, and they’d deal with problems if they came up.

* * *

“What do you mean, they’re not at the post office? Where are they?” Iselda shouted into the phone.

Carl set his coffee down and crossed the room into three strides. Iselda put the call on speaker.

“Their apartment is paid up for the next three months. Their neighbors said some visitors came and then they all left with luggage this morning,” Bridger said, his voice tinny with the bad connection.

“Are they coming back to London?” Carl asked.

“Or heading absolutely anywhere in the world? You know which passports the three of them used to leave the UK, track them!” Iselda said.

“I’m splitting up the strike force. I’ll send some back to London. They may have found the medical clinic in Romania; I’ll send the rest of my team there,” Bridger said. “As soon as they cross a border, we’ll know which location.”

Iselda’s blood turned to ice at the thought of a strike force rampaging through the Blessed Mary Medical Clinic and finding what they’d hidden there since the 1940s. Damn Meta Kozak to hell for addressing the box to such a sensitive location.

“Find them, Bridger!” Iselda disconnected the call.

“We’ll get them back,” Carl said, putting an arm around Iselda’s shoulders. “We’ll get them back and continue the medical research that Steven started.”

“I don’t care about the medical research, Carl, I care about finding the people who killed our son! They’re going to pay for that. They can feel pain, and they don’t want to be separated. I’ll make them suffer for the rest of my life to pay them back for what they did to Steven. As long as I’m alive, they’re going to hurt. If I can find a way to make sure they keep hurting after I’m dead, I’ll do it. Making money off them is secondary.”

Carl’s arms tightened around her.

* * *

The flight from Kyiv to L’viv was fine, but the charter plane from L’viv to Chernivtsi was smaller than that drug runner’s plan and just as rickety. Nile had been immortal long enough to worry more about what would happen to Andy and Copley in a plane crash than her, but even if she knew she’d come back to life, dying still wasn’t a pleasant experience. 

The weapons that kept them from taking a commercial flight were stowed in the webbing near the back of the plane, packed as innocuously as possible into cheap carry on luggage they’d bought in Kyiv. Andy’s labrys was in a cello case. 

Nicky was seated across from her, strapped into a jump seat that folded down from the fuselage. He had his eyes closed and head bowed. Every so often, he moved his lips and she wondered if he was praying. Did he still believe in God? Nile fingered the golden cross she still wore on a delicate chain around her neck. She wanted to ask him a hundred questions, but she doubted she’d get much time to talk to him alone. Joe would always be there. Talking about Christianity around someone whose land had been invaded during the Crusades might be awkward, especially since she still wanted to believe in Jesus. Did Nicky still consider himself a Christian? How did Joe feel about Islam? Did nobody believe in God or was that just Andy? Was it okay to ask things like that? 

Nile closed her eyes and dropped her head back against the headrest. There was a hammer and sickle molded into the fuselage above the door; this was an old Soviet plane. The only words she knew in Russian were ‘play dead.’ She couldn’t help thinking of that, over and over again.

Her thoughts jumped and skittered around, rattling like this cheap aircraft that sounded like the bolts were coming loose. Her brother, so wan after the surgery when he was six to fix a small hernia; Copley almost crying when he talked about his wife; Andy not telling anyone her wounds weren’t healing; her mama making enough spaghetti for all the neighbors; her dad explaining tools to her and letting her help change the oil; Nicky beaming at her when she ate a candy bar yesterday; her little cousin crying because her bike had a flat tire and then hugging Nile when she fixed it; playing cards with Jay and Dizzy before things got weird; Booker telling her it would be a mistake to try and talk to her family. 

Believing him.

Her tour of duty ended yesterday. If her family hadn’t spent the last two months thinking she was dead, she would be home right now. This mission was supposed to fill up her mind so much she couldn’t think about it. It wasn’t working.

At Chernivtsi, they left the rickety plane and paid cash for two rickety trucks. Nile thought longingly of an MRAP. 

They stopped at a department store and bought sleeping bags and stuff. They had a bag full of MREs and bottled water. Borsa was only about 240 km from here, but the roads were shit and it was already late afternoon. The plan was to arrive tomorrow, because there were less likely to be people in the clinic on a Sunday. They planned to spend one night camped out, both coming and going. They piled gear in the back of the tiny old pickup trucks and strapped the new stuff down under tarps with bungee cords, next to the weapons and extra gas cans. 

“Nile, ride with Joe. Joe, teach her enough Romanian to find the exit and the mail drop. Nicky, come tell Copley what all this medical jargon means,” Andy said, letting herself into the driver’s seat of one of the trucks.

“Sure, boss,” Joe said. Joe and Nicky exchanged glances, and then Nicky got in the cab of the truck with Andy and Copley.

“Too bad we couldn’t buy a Suburban and all ride together,” Nile commented, wondering if she should offer to drive. There was a weird noise in second gear, and she worried the gear’s synchronizer was going bad. The truck might last longer if the driver shifted into third as soon as possible. They had a ton of weapons; did they have tools? She should have bought some wrenches and a jack.

Joe was already getting into the driver’s seat. When they were pulling out onto the road, Nile pointed out the grinding noise and told Joe to use second gear as little as he could.

“Will do, boss.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Nile said. “It’s just that I can hear the teeth in that gear grinding.”

“You like cars?” Joe asked, lugging the engine a bit as he shifted into third gear almost as soon as he’d shifted into second.

Nile spent the next half hour talking to Joe about her dad teaching her car engine parts and her (now irrelevant) plans to transition out of near-combat support into equipment mechanic at her next re-up. By that time, they’d gotten to the city limits, because the scenery changed from massive apartment buildings that reminded her of photos she’d seen of New York City into green fields, trees, and a house once in a while. Damn, those were horses too.

“Listen to me go on. You’re supposed to teach me how to find the mail drop,” Nile said. Talking about her dad was too close to talking about her mama and her brother. Her insides were rattling as much as that old plane and she needed to hold it together.

“Mail is ‘posta’ in Romanian, like post office in English,” Joe said.

“That’s easy enough.”

“My papa taught me spices. We were a merchant family from Tunisia. We traveled all over the Maghreb and into Arabia, which is why I was in Jerusalem to get killed by Nicky during the Crusades. I was an accidental soldier. Everyone defended against the invasion.” 

Nile stayed quiet and listened to Joe tell fascinating stories about Middle Eastern spice routes and his father’s adventurousness. Nile decided she loved his voice and the way he picked out kindnesses like cherries and remembered them for centuries, still as sweet as the day they happened. His sense of humor was touched with irony and a keen observation of the ridiculous that never descended into ridicule. Plus, his teeth looked so good against his beard. 

Her one and only boyfriend, Tyrone, had worn a close-cropped beard. Joe’s skin was several shades lighter than Tyrone’s, but his beard was still as black as midnight. She loved the look of white teeth against a black beard and brown skin. Joe was laughing out loud at something he’d just said, and Nile felt her heart do a little flip.

Damn, she was going to start crushing on Joe. Fine, yeah, she was already crushing on Joe. Seriously, look at him. This happened to her sometimes. It was nothing that lasted. Joe was taken, and he wouldn’t want her anyway. The crush would fade -- they always did -- the important thing was to not embarrass herself. She was going to know Joe for the next several centuries at least, and she didn’t want to writhe in embarrassment every time she remembered the drive to Borsa. Nile closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and took a deep breath.

“Are you alright? Headache?”

“I think you’re supposed to teach me how to read ‘exit’ in Romanian too.” Best to get this conversation back to business.

“That’s easy. It’s ‘exit.’”

Joe laughed at his own quip, but Nile didn’t join in this time. They drove in silence for several minutes. 

“I am going to say something and you can tell me to mind my own business,” Joe said at last.

“Go ahead.”

“If you want to go home and spend the next ten years watching your little brother grow up and cherishing every moment with your mother, the team would be fine. We’ll check in on you once in a while, pass ourselves off as Army buddies or something.”

“Marines, not Army,” Nile said, and pressed her lips tightly together. She was crushing on him, and he was being kind about the most enormous pain she’d ever felt, and . . . and . . . Nile whooped out a sob and clapped her hand to her mouth. Then it was too late to stop it and she doubled over, crying out everything she’d stifled these past two months, and especially the last day. Because right now, she should be home, in the chaos of a half dozen cousins and even more friends, arguing about the toppings on the pizza and then ordering all of them, fake-wrestling with Sakeem and promising Gran she’d visit tomorrow while her mama lectured everyone to go home and let Nile get some sleep in this time zone. 

“Nile?”

Nile didn’t think anyone had ever said her name so gently. 

“Nile?” This time there was also a hand brushing her shoulder.

She shook her head wordlessly, gulping and choking on sobs.

The hand settled on her shoulder and squeezed. “I have made a beautiful woman cry. My heart is in tatters.”

Nile reached up and threaded her fingers through Joe’s, because she was pathetic and she needed to. After a minute, Joe pulled his hand away. She heard him rustling with something in the tiny space behind their seats, a zipper being yanked and something shaking out. Then he pushed soft fabric onto her lap and she clutched it to her face.

Nile coughed and her shoulders spasmed with the force of her crying, muffling it in the cloth. She didn’t try to stop crying anymore; this was going to happen whether she wanted it to or not. She would depend on Joe’s kindness to not make this a humiliating memory.

“Sorry,” she managed to say.

“You do not say sorry. If you need to cry, then you cry. I’m here when you’re finished and you can tell me what has torn your heart so badly.”

That set her off again. Every so often Joe took his hand back to steer, but he always reached for her fingers again, and kept his hand on her shoulder when both her hands were busy trying to find a dry spot on the cloth as the truck lurched through potholes, caught in the stop and start traffic of a bad road.

“Yesterday was the day my deployment would be over,” Nile said when she calmed enough to speak. “I would be home right now, if . . . all this . . . I’d be home. But my family thinks I died two months ago.”

“When that man slashed your neck? They know that didn’t kill you.”

“When Andy kidnapped me,” Nile corrected him. “I was going to go home and stay as long as I could. I’d have at least ten years before they noticed something was different, maybe fifteen. But Booker convinced me it would be a bad idea. I was gonna go home anyway, but then I couldn’t leave you all when I knew Booker betrayed you.”

Joe’s face went very still, and then his eyebrows drew down in a scowl. “Booker? Booker told you that?”

“Yeah, he told me about his family dying and how much they hated him for not sharing the secret of his immortality. Wait, is this your t-shirt? I blew snot all over your t-shirt?”

“Booker’s family hated him because they were all a bunch of selfish entitled pricks. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. His experience did not have to be your experience. Damn it, I heard Andy tell him to talk to you about family and I meant to head him off, but then all that shit happened.” 

“You mean getting kidnapped? It’s okay you forgot to talk to me,” Nile said. It helped to hear someone say her family wouldn’t have hated her. It was too late to matter, but it helped. Being able to cry helped too. 

“Oh, Allah,” Joe’s eyes closed briefly, as if in sympathy. “Booker did to you what he did to us. He took his pain and made it evil. He stole your last years with your family, poisoning them with the hatred and selfishness from his own life. Nile, Booker betrayed you too, moments after you met. That man’s treachery runs so deep. So deep.”

Nile had been raised to think the best of people and give them the benefit of the doubt, so she automatically defended Booker. “He was sorry. For what he did and how it spiraled out of his control. Copley thought they were doing some good.”

“He wasn’t sorry. He wanted us to feel sorry for him! You should have heard him whining about being lonely, as if that justified what he did!”

Apparently she wasn’t the only one in this truck with some emotional baggage to work through. “Andy said he felt terrible about getting all of you captured and tried to stop them when they took her.”

Joe huffed out an unhappy laugh. “Andy? He would have felt sorry about what he did to Andy. He never felt sorry for what he did to us.”

“He was alone,” Nile said. Joe and Nicky were together. After hearing the story of Quynh, Nile realized that Andy had had someone for centuries too. Booker had never been paired off. She identified with him in that regard, at least. She was always going to be alone; no one would ever want someone like her. Tyrone had said it, and she only believed him because it was true. She worked extra hard in other ways, so people would need her work and her skills, even though they would never need her as a person. 

“He was alone before he was ever immortal,” Joe said. “He betrayed his business partners. They’re the ones who had him thrown in jail for forgery. He betrayed his regiment when he deserted. I never heard him say a kind word about his wife.” Joe shrugged. “I’ve heard him tell the story about how his dying son hated him and didn’t believe Booker would share his immortality to save his life. I’ve wondered what happened so that the son knew his father wouldn’t have saved him even if he could.”

Nile started to cry again, more quietly this time, turning Joe’s t-shirt inside out in search of a dry spot. “I could have gone home! I got people that love me!”

“Oh, Nile.” Joe took advantage of a smooth patch in the road to loop a hand around Nile’s shoulders and pull her in for a kiss on the forehead. His beard tickled. 

Nile cried for several minutes. “Who did you leave behind?”

“Not many people. My mother died when I was a youth. The Crusaders killed my brothers. My father died of disease. My sister survived. The war anyway, she survived the war. She told me I sinned against Allah for my friendship with an infidel. She forgave me before she died, though. In childbirth. She and my nephew both died. At least I was there. I got to say good-bye and she wished me peace.”

Nile was still trying to come up with a way to respond to that when Joe went on.

“Nicky had a little brother too, and many sisters. You should talk to him about this.”

“I will.”

The conversation lapsed into silence. Being quiet with Joe was comforting. She felt peaceful, a little wrung out, and deeply relieved at being able to release some of the pain inside her. The grief hadn’t run its course, but at least it wasn’t dammed up anymore. She felt a bit drowsy, her body lurching with the rough road.

Outside, the sky turned dusky, softening the bright green of the fields and trees. They passed a petrol station a while back, but other than that, it was mostly farmhouses with thatched roofs, like something out of a storybook. Other than two tours of duty in Afghanistan, Nile had never left the United States. Her mama could barely afford to buy clothes and pay rent; there was nothing for travel. 

“You guys travel all over the world.”

“We do. The longest we ever stay in one place is ten years. Once people start saying you haven’t changed a bit, it’s time to move on.”

Ten years in one place seemed like a long time. She’d never stayed ten years anywhere.

They got in line at the border checkpoint into Romania. Nile was nervous, but Joe chewed gum and acted like they had nothing to worry about. Nicky did all the talking. The checkpoint officer scanned their passports and didn’t bother opening the suitcases full of weapons, waving them out of the border station to get to the next vehicle.

* * *

Andy pulled the truck off the road as the day grayed into twilight, parking around the back side of the hill where they couldn’t be seen from the road. Nicky stifled a sigh of relief. He loved Andy, and needed to get to know Copley, but there was something . . . off, an emotional dynamic he could not name but that troubled him. Andy told stories of adventures with Quynh before the four of them had met. Nicky had not heard Andy speak of Quynh without pain in 400 years, yet now she seemed to savor the sweetness in the memories. Nicky heard stories he had never heard before, and he wondered why Copley could draw this out of her.

Copley spoke about Raya, her life and her death. When Copley described the fury of being helpless while his wife suffered, struggled and died, Andy kept saying she knew how he felt. It was as if Andy had blessed Copley’s story with empathy, and now she understood why he had set them up for capture.

It left Nicky cold. If Andy understood it, did it lessen what Copley had done? Did she sympathize with him? Booker had expected Andy to sympathize with him, and understand why he did it. She understood him; did that mean her sympathies were with Booker?

What do you do, when you understand why someone betrayed you? If he extended empathy to Booker, what would that mean?

Nicky got out of the truck, leaving Andy and Copley to finish the story of Raya’s foray into publishing a book of poetry. He needed the clarity of Joe’s straightforward nature. Joe had already gotten out of his truck, and was talking to Nile by the tailgate. They were talking and laughing as they rifled through the supplies. There was something different about Nile’s expression when she looked at Joe, as if her heart had broken in Joe’s presence, allowing in the sunshine of his personality and braiding them together. Nicky knew that feeling.

Joe turned towards him and waved him over with a huge grin. “Nicky! We have spoken of our families and Nile wishes to speak to you about the God you still believe in!”

“You don’t really do subtlety, do you Joe?” Nile said.

Joe laughed and gave Nicky a one-armed hug around the shoulders. “Go. We can find the MREs without your help.”

That was how Nicky found himself walking through a copse of trees with Nile by his side, neither one of them speaking. He did not have Joe’s boldness to plunge into a discussion of something so personal as faith, so he started with something else. 

“I’ve never said thank you for rescuing us. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Nile answered breezily. 

“I think it was a problem, but you did it anyway.”

“They made it easy. It’s good they kept you all together. I guess it could have been worse.”

Nicky huffed out a laugh with a cynical half-smile. “We were spattered with the blood of the guards we killed when they dragged us into the lab. How would they clean it off? Dr. Kozak insisted we be clean enough to not contaminate her samples. They were afraid to release us. We had killed the guards in the van, even with our hands zip-tied and our feet chained. They were smart to be afraid.

“Do you know what they did? They dragged Joe to the exam bed and told him if he fought at all, they would separate us. Dr. Kozak said they would stop tasing me once Joe was strapped down. When the taser stopped and I could see again, Joe was strapped down and someone was washing away the blood on his head. The scalpels and needles were already laid out. They said the same thing to me - if I fought, they would separate us, and they would stop tasing Joe only once I was strapped down. I hurried to cooperate. They did not keep us together out of kindness, but to use our love for each other to force our compliance.” 

Nile stared at him in horror. “I’d kinda been hoping that Dr. Kozak would have a change of heart, like Copley did, but I guess not.”

Nicky watched the ground, green and alive under their feet. There were no trails here. “When Merrick stabbed my beloved, all she saw was the Nobel Prize. This one does not have compassion or conscience.” Dr. Kozak had held his face gently as she bathed the blood off his forehead and face, caressing him like a lover while he was still dazed from the drugs and the taser. Every time she cut him, she spread her hand over his healing flesh and stroked the new skin. He pressed his lips together and breathed in through his nose. “I will be forever in your debt for arriving before she collected a sperm sample.”

“Dear God,” Nile whispered. She lifted her arm, as if she wanted to hug him, and then stopped halfway.

Nicky caught her hand and pressed a kiss onto her knuckles before letting go. “Sometimes I still believe in Him.”

“I want to believe in Him too,” Nile said, and that was enough to open the floodgates of everything she’d been bottling up these past two months. Who was she if she didn’t have faith as one of her cornerstones? She told Nicky all about her childhood going to church every week, the Christmas pageant, her friends at Bible school, singing badly in the choir and having them all love her anyway, the way the congregation rallied around them when her dad died, the sendoff when she joined the Marines. She even admitted to reading what they all wrote about her on the funeral home webpage. He listened without interrupting her until she ran out of stories.

“You have a beautiful community, Nile, but you have not said a word to me about your faith in God.”

He watched her face when she opened her mouth to object, then realized he was right, and shut it again. “What the hell?”

“Faith in God, any god, builds a community. How much of what we do and believe is about God? And how much is about community? Neither Joe nor I are practicing religionists anymore. We tried. Joe tried for longer than I did. I was quite hurt and angry when they defrocked me for preaching that we should love our enemies the way Jesus taught. Then I said that the Muslims were not our enemies and this was heresy too. But even for Joe, the prayers and rituals and rules lost their meaning when he lost the connection to his community. He still practices _zakat,_ the alms-giving. If you give Joe money, he’ll give some of it away.”

“You still pray. I saw you on the plane yesterday.”

“Yes, I pray. It brings me peace, and so I pray. I believe there is a God, and I believe God is good.”

“Why?”

“I believe in God because it brings me peace. The centuries where I have declared that my faith is dead brought me pain and confusion. This is why I believe.”

“That’s all you’ve got? I thought you would have proof or something.”

Her words stung; she couldn’t know how much Nicky was struggling with his belief in goodness right now. 

“Yes, that’s all I’ve got,” he said. 

The evening light was failing, but he still saw the moment her expression softened. “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s enough, Nicky. Thanks for talking to me.”

Nile was a perceptive woman.

Also, she gave very nice hugs.

* * *

Late that night, tucked securely against Joe’s chest, Nicky couldn’t keep the thoughts from going around and around his head, refusing to be lulled into sleep by the warmth of Joe’s breath against his neck. How did one continue to believe in goodness when the only reason he believed was because it brought him peace? There was no objective goodness; it was all self-delusion and wishful thinking. 

Booker had exposed the limits of Nicky’s beliefs. They could not stretch enough to encompass betrayal without tearing. Or perhaps the fault was not in his beliefs. Perhaps the fault was in Nicky himself, for not wanting to be good anymore. If goodness required him to empathize with Booker the way Andy empathized with Copley, he couldn’t do it. 

The fitful sleep he eventually fell into was shallow enough that the noise in the sky roused him. Nicky identified a helicopter passing over them before falling back to sleep, but he forgot about it before morning.


	6. Clinic

They were 10 kilometers from their target the next morning when Andy saw something in the morning sunshine that didn’t look like a fall of rocks. She slowed down, then turned right and pulled off the road. This far up in the mountains, the road was more of a track, with patches of asphalt broken up by plants. The area was more rural and sparse than she’d expected. This medical clinic really was in the backwoods of nowhere.

Nile was driving the other truck, with Nicky in the passenger seat. Andy did that on purpose - she wanted Nile to have some one-on-one time with each of her teammates. Last night, she’d noticed the change between her and Joe, and the long walk with Nicky. Joe and Nicky already seemed easier with Nile than they ever had with Booker, even after 200 years and the little traditions Nicky worked so hard to use as connections. Watching Nile made her realize all over again how difficult it had been to integrate Booker into the team.

“What are we doing, boss?” Nicky asked, getting out of the truck.

“Checking that out,” Andy said, with a nod towards the things that definitely weren’t fallen rocks. Was that a front-end loader? Covered in lichen and moss, with a tree growing through the rusted out cab, the line of the bucket was too straight for nature to have created it. That’s what had caught Andy’s eye.

“Holy shit, that’s a 24,000 lb dump truck. Who left it up here to get rusted out like that?” Nile asked, striding past them to go pound on the side of the dump truck. It echoed, and bits of rust flaked off.

“That’s the second question,” Copley said. “The first question is how did they get it up here in the first place? Certainly not over the roads we’ve been driving on.” He picked his way around the front-end loader. 

“It’s a graveyard for heavy construction equipment,” Nicky observed. “They built something, and then left the tools to die. Like that terrible Duke from the 1200s who would commission an artist and then have him killed when he was finished so the work would remain one-of-a-kind.”

“You know, I had almost managed to forget about that,” Joe said.

Joe had definitely had the most disagreeable task on that job. The mosaic he created before the Duke murdered him was now in a museum, misattributed to a Spanish artist.

“The question is, what did they build with it?” Andy asked, following Copley’s route around the trucks. He was standing next to a ravine. Down at the bottom was a thicket of trees and shrubs, with rust-covered pieces of trucks so obscured that it was impossible to tell what they used to be. A rock rolled under her foot and she ended up grabbing Copley’s arm to keep her balance. He caught at her hand, pressed her fingers, and then they both let go.

Andy looked around, trying to see something in the terrain that would tell her what construction equipment was doing in this mountainous idyll. They hadn’t even passed a house in the last four kilometers. Copley’s satellite feed didn’t show anything but trees between here and the clinic.

“We’ll halt a kilometer from the clinic and hide the trucks, go the rest of the way on foot so we’re not spotted. Nicky, you’re going to climb a tree and spend a couple hours watching the clinic with binoculars before we head in,” Andy said.

“Right, boss,” Nicky said.

They got in the trucks and headed back out on the road.

* * *

Andy strapped on an ammo vest. Nicky was already in a tree looking through binoculars with his sniper rifle slung over his back. His report came through the earpieces. Copley had found better quality equipment than they’d used on other jobs; Nicky’s voice wasn’t even tinny.

“The clinic looks to be about 1,000 square meters. The sign over the door says Blessed Mary Medical Clinic. No vehicles. No animals. I don’t see any lights on through the windows or anyone moving around inside,” Nicky reported.

“Nile, circle around behind the clinic,” Andy said.

Nile nodded and moved out.

“No people at all is almost as suspicious as too many people,” Joe said.

“We picked Sunday for a reason. There shouldn’t be people,” Andy said.

“People get sick on any day of the week. This place is too remote to be a community medical clinic,” Joe said.

“The clinic was built in the 1940s after World War II, when this area was more built up,” Copley said. “The population patterns shifted but the clinic didn’t move.”

“Guys, this is weird,” Nile’s voice said through the earpiece. “The whole back side of the hilltop is missing, like there was a rockslide or mudslide or something.”

“Recently?” Andy asked.

“No, it’s all grown over with grass and shrubs, but it’s a really steep drop-off that doesn’t match the rest of the rolling hills around here,” Nile said.

“Got it, Nile. Joe, scout around to the other side of the clinic. Take binoculars. You and Nicky figure out what you can about the layout of the clinic.”

“Yes, boss.”

They spent the next two hours learning everything they could from observing the clinic. After getting reports from everyone, Andy summarized the information and then asked for input.

“Something’s off, boss, we don’t just stroll in and be polite. I say we go in armed and search the place,” Joe said.

“Andy, you can stay outside with Copley. We should have a spotter on both sides of the clinic to see if someone arrives,” Nicky said through the earpiece.

“Are you giving me orders, Nicky?”

“No.”

“Good, because I go in first,” Andy said.

“But if something’s wrong,” Nile objected.

“If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for all of us,” Andy said, cutting her off.

Andy got the impression she was getting a murderous look from Nile through the earpiece.

“You know that’s not true,” Copley said quietly from where he was sitting on a fallen log with a satellite modem and laptop.

Andy took her finger off the earpiece to stop transmitting. “What did you say?”

“You’re not helping your team by pretending nothing’s changed. You can get killed. They can’t. Face facts, Andromache.”

“I lead. I can’t do that from out here.”

“If you go in there, they’ll all worry about you. If they run into trouble, they’ll do whatever it takes to protect you. You won’t be able to stop them. Factor that into your plans if you’re still determined to go first.” Copley’s voice was as level as his gaze.

“Fuck you.”

“Mm,” Copley responded, then looked back at his computer screen where he was watching a satellite feed.

Andy glared at the ground, then made a decision. “Nicky, you’re going in first. Keep your weapons hidden. You can pass for Romanian the easiest in case the clinic is staffed. If you can find the post box with the tissue samples and get out easily, do it. Keep your earpiece transmitting. If there is anyone else in the clinic, say so and I’ll be right behind you.”

“Boss,” Joe said.

How the hell that man could give an entire speech in one word blew her mind. “Fine,” Andy said, “Joe and I will be right behind you. Nile and Copley watch the outside. Go.”

From her vantage point next to Copley, Andy watched Nicky stroll up to the clinic, a backpack casually slung over his shoulder. He was dressed in a t-shirt and old jeans, everything loose fitting to conceal the guns and knives Andy knew he was hiding. He was monologuing through the earpiece in Romanian, which left Nile out of the loop, but would sound more natural than English if he encountered someone. He switched back to English once he was inside the clinic and found it deserted.

“There is a pile of outgoing mail on the front desk,” Nicky said. He described the reception area and exam rooms. The posters on the walls were for things like well-child checkups and dental hygiene. Nicky made his way through the clinic, quickly searching the two exam rooms and finding the supply room in the back. His commentary cut off with an ‘oh.’

“Nicky?” Joe asked before Andy could.

“There is an elevator.”

* * *

There were not supposed to be elevators in one-level rural medical clinics. Joe was out of the trees and heading for the clinic before Andy could tell him not to, not bothering to hide his gun. Nicky said the clinic was deserted, and he felt better with a weapon in his hands. Andy caught up to him before he got out of the reception area.

At the back of the clinic, Nicky had the elevator door open, his foot blocking it from closing. “There are six floors,” he said.

“Is there a security card reader?” Andy asked.

“We’re not getting in an elevator,” Joe said.

“The tissue specimens are not here. We may have to look for them on the other floors,” Nicky said.

“Copley, we’ve got six floors below this one. You got any intel on that?” Andy asked her earpiece.

“Stairs,” Nicky said, nodding at a door. “The specimen box isn’t on this level. There might be labs on the other levels.”

“We weren’t expecting labs,” Joe said. “Or other levels.”

“You know that excavation equipment we found? I think we know what they used it for,” Andy said. “Copley doesn’t have any information. This won’t be any easier if we come back later. I say we search now.”

Joe opened the door to the stairs. Andy went first. He waved Nicky through second so he could keep an eye on him and cover them from behind. The stairs were painted concrete, with concrete walls and painted iron handrails, everything gray.

Level One was operating rooms. Nicky waited at the door, covering the staircase, while Andy and Joe did a quick sweep. The lower level was about half the floor space of the main level. It took less than two minutes to open all the drawers and cupboards.

The second level was laboratories. This time Andy covered the stairwell while Joe and Nicky searched. Microscopes in plastic covers sat on the counters next to a few over-sized computer monitors, all dark. Many of the cabinets were locked. They broke the locks, splintering the wood of the cabinets. There were racks of empty specimen jars and tubes, but nothing full of tissue samples.

The third level was marked ‘biohazard’ and the door was locked.

At the fourth level, Andy pressed her ear against the door. “I can hear something in there.”

“We’ll search it on the way back out if we don’t already have the box,” Nicky suggested.

Andy nodded, and they went down to the next level.

The fifth level was full of filing cabinets, row after row of metal filing cabinets with hand-lettered cards labeling the drawers. There obviously wouldn’t be tissue specimens here, but Nicky lingered to read the labels until Joe hissed at him from where he was covering the stairwell.

The sixth level was living quarters, graced by enormous floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out into the Carpathian mountains behind the clinic.

“It’s a nice view,” Joe commented.

“Someone lives here,” Nicky said, looking into the second room. 

“Let’s go check the fourth level. If we can’t find the tissue specimens, we get out of here and figure out Plan B,” Andy said. 

Joe and Nicky preceded her up the stairs, guns drawn.

They stopped at the fourth level door and took turns listening at the door.

“Animals,” Joe said, and opened the door.

He was right. Monkeys screamed from cages as the door opened, and a dog barked. There was a rack of mice in cages, and a few rabbits. The small space was crowded with caged animals. 

“There will be specimens in here,” Nicky said.

“Go, hurry, I’ll cover the stairwell,” Andy said.

Joe moved quickly, opening a cabinet next to the monkey cages and finding rows and rows of specimen bottles, much more than they were looking for. He filled his pockets and then started stuffing tubes into ammo loops on his vest. Nicky was doing the same at a rack next to a sink.

There was no warning besides a split second of a pneumatic hiss, and then steel walls descended from the ceiling, slamming down to the floor in less than a second with an impact that made the room shudder. The monkeys screamed and scolded them.

“Nicky!” Joe shouted, but there was nowhere to go. They could see all four metal walls that had come down in a cage around them, without any way out.

“There must be a release mechanism,” Nicky said, running his hands over countertops.

“They’ll release it from the outside, once they know they can recapture the animal. We must have triggered a motion sensor,” Joe said, searching the ceiling for cameras.

“Andy!” Nicky shouted. “Find the release mechanism! It might be in the labs or the main level!”

From the other side of the metal wall, they could hear Andy swearing and pounding on the metal wall, and then her footsteps heading up the stairs.

“Come on, as long as we’re here, let’s dump this shit. It’s too much to carry.” Joe started unscrewing jars and tubes, pouring blood and other liquids down the sink while the monkeys rattled their cages and the dog barked up a storm.

The animal noise cut off like a switch flipped, pulling Joe’s attention. The dog huddled down with its paws over its eyes. The monkeys curled up, whimpering. Even the rabbits were climbing all over each other in a pile.

“Joe,” Nicky said, getting his gun back out.

There was a click and then a hiss. Joe felt the jet of air against his skin and it filled his nose with sweetened antiseptic. His last thought before he passed out was to grab Nicky and get them closer to the door so Andy could drag them out once she figured out how to release the cage walls.

* * *

“Nile!” Andy shouted at her earpiece. “Joe and Nicky are trapped in an animal containment cage. We’ve got to find the release switch! You start on the main level; I’ll search the labs on the second level. Copley, anything you’ve got would help.”

Andy had almost reached the door to the second level when the door to the third level, the one locked and marked ‘biohazard’ was thrown open and men in tactical gear poured out.

“Shit! Fuck! Ambush! Nile, get out of here! We’ve got a dozen hostiles!” Andy sprinted up the stairs, firing once behind her. 

Orders in German filled the stairwell. Half the crew stopped chasing her and turned around, heading down towards the animal lab where Joe and Nicky were trapped. She wanted to go after them, but knew that committing suicide wouldn’t help Joe and Nicky. Fuck mortality!

Nile met her halfway down the first stairwell.

“I told you to get out of here!” Andy greeted her with a snarl.

“Court martial me, why don’t you? Move, boss.” Nile dropped back so Andy could pass her, and then fired twice, killing the man who was closest to them. “He knows who you are.”

“What?”

“That guy had a tranq gun.”

“Copley, what’s going on topside?” Andy demanded of the earpiece.

“A truck just pulled up. I count four men with guns. I’m engaging.”

From outside the clinic, Andy heard gunfire as the two women reached the door of the stairwell. She kicked it open, firing as she went. A man keeled over dead. The second man shot her in the shoulder before she shot him between the eyes. Andy swung around, looking for more hostiles, her left arm useless. Nile was crouched near the stairwell door, her weapon trained on the door. There was one body slumped over and propping the door open, no one following him. 

More gunfire from outside, and a shout in German.

“Andy!” Nile shouted, her weapon swinging from the open door to the window.

It felt like the largest hornet in the world stung her in the back of the arm. She saw men coming up from the stairwell, the noise seeming to come from very far away, and then the world slid into blackness.

* * *

Copley was relieved to still be alive, although he was fairly sure that Andromache would kill him once the tranquilizer wore off. He carried her part of the way back to the trucks, then fashioned a stretcher out of tree branches and their jackets to drag her the rest of the way. She was still out cold as he threw everything useful from the second truck into the back of the first truck and drove off. 

Night had fallen before she woke up, still seat belted into the passenger seat. Copley had been driving for seven hours, he estimated. They’d stopped only to buy more petrol. He was staying in Romania to avoid a border check. 

She exhaled a long groan and flinched. “Everything hurts.”

“You’ve been shot in the shoulder; your lip is split; you’ve got a black eye; I’m pretty sure your ankle is broken,” Copley categorized for her.

“Shiiiit.”

Copley waited for the rest of it to come back to her, which it did with a jerk and she sat up.

“My team!”

“They got Nile. By the time I got inside the clinic, Nile was gone and the door to the stairwell was shut. I killed two men to get you out of there. There wasn’t anybody else,” Copley said. He pulled off the road and turned off the engine until he knew what was going to happen.

“And you just left them?” Andromache screamed at him.

Copley shut his eyes and resigned himself to death.

What actually happened was worse. She vocalized that guttural cry he’d heard after Booker shot her and zip-tied her hands. He wondered if it was a grief cry from her original people, a sound evolved and designed solely to express rage and helplessness.

“We’ll go back,” she said a few minutes later. “We’ll buy every weapon we can find and hire every mercenary you’ve ever worked with, and we’ll go back.”

Copley closed his eyes again. “They won’t be there. A helicopter took off shortly after I got you out of there.”

The silence unnerved him.

“We’ll find them. I’ll get you to the safehouse. By the time you’ve healed, I’ll have found them and we’ll get them back. I promise you.” Copley willed her to believe him.

“That’s a promise?”

“Yes.”

“I want one more promise.”

“Anything.”

“If you can’t find them, you kill me.”

Copley’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. Raya had insisted on the same promise from him. He’d agreed, and then refused to do it when she asked for death.

“I promise,” he said. 

When she didn’t say anything more, he started the truck again and pulled back onto the road.


	7. Scattered

Ian Bridger stayed after he had strapped the Italian to the medical table and Dr. Meta Kozak didn’t dare tell him to leave. Nico would wake up soon, and she wanted that moment alone with him to set the tone for the way they would work together. Yes, she had needed Bridger’s help because she couldn’t lift Nico by herself, but once that was done, he should have left. She wanted Nico undressed to make it easier to take tissue samples, but she wasn’t going to cut his clothes off with Bridger watching. Instead, she took off his shoes, but left his socks, and then attached the heart monitors underneath his t-shirt.

Who bought his clothes? Who put such a handsome man in such worn and dingy clothes?

Nico opened his eyes, his limbs flexing against the straps that fastened him down. His gaze swept the entire room, barely pausing when he recognized her, before focusing on Bridger. Meta made a note on her clipboard about how long the sedative kept him unconscious and the dose she had given him before the gas from the animal lab could wear off. He was affected by the anesthetic, but metabolized it much faster than ordinary humans did. A dose that strong would have knocked out a man his size for at least three hours. Nico had remained unconscious for just under four minutes. She should have sent more sedative with the men in the helicopter.

“Where are my teammates?” Nico asked Bridger in Romanian.

“He speaks English, French and German,” Meta said.

Nico repeated the question in English.

“Do you recognize me?” Bridger asked him.

Nico studied the man’s face. Meta had been subjected to that measured gaze, and had not liked what he’d said to her.

“You are the man Andy defeated on the skywalk, the one who told us that Merrick was in the penthouse,” Nico said at last.

Meta’s eyes went wide.

Bridger hit Nico, smashing him across his face with his fist, and then pulled his gun and emptied what was left of his ammunition into Nico’s head and torso.

“Stop! Stop!” Meta screamed, hiding her face in her hands, her clipboard clattering to the floor.

Bridger didn’t stop until the gun was empty, then he rounded on her. “If you ever repeat what he just said, I’ll give you the same. Do you understand?”

“Yes, not a word from me, of course.” Her heart was beating out her ears. The smell of blood and gore caught in the back of her throat and made her want to cough but she stifled it.

“I’ll be back every day until he tells me the location of their safehouses and I’ve caught that bitch.”

“You won’t --” Meta gestured at the mess he’d made of Nico.

Bridger grinned at her. “Why not? Don’t you want to measure what happens? Next time I’ll let you film it.” Then he walked out.

Meta was a research doctor, not a trauma surgeon, and she had never seen such violence done to a human body. Yet she couldn’t help but watch him heal. The t-shirt was obscuring the regeneration of his torso. Quickly, she pulled on latex gloves and picked up a scalpel, the closest blade at hand, and sliced off his t-shirt in time to watch the skin closing. The bullets had gone clean through his body, lodging in the table; they hadn’t ricocheted. She watched the skull knit itself and the cheek grow back together. It was altogether the most remarkable thing she’d ever seen.

By the time his body jerked with the return of life, Meta was watching his heart rate on the monitor, her hand on his left breast to detect the return of his heartbeat. The monitor beeped, shot up to 160, then just as quickly dropped to 120, back up to 140, and then settled into a normal range within a second.

“Was that interesting for you?” he asked.

Meta snatched her hand off his body but refused to look ashamed. “I am a doctor. I have much to learn from you.”

“I cannot teach you anything that matters.”

“It matters to me,” Meta said, angry at herself for caring what he thought. She could feel red spots forming on her cheeks.

He looked at her without speaking.

“These next several years will be more tolerable for you if you don’t think of me as an enemy,” Meta said.

He drew breath as if to say something, and then didn’t say it. He didn’t say another word, not even when she cut the rest of his clothes off, hooked up the tubing to the sink, and rinsed the blood and gore from his body and the table. He cooperated, shifting his body as much as he could in the straps to allow the water to flow under him, holding still while she soaped and rinsed his hair to get the blood and brains out. She took her time drying him off afterwards, pretending that the exam was clinical and medical, checking the muscle tone in his calves and thighs and the integrity of the skin across his chest where he had been injured. She left his sex alone other than looking. He appeared normal in all respects.

“You’ll be more comfortable with cloth between you and the vinyl,” she offered when he was dry. He cooperated again, shifting so she could slide strips of a cotton sheet between his body and the medical table. If he noticed that she touched him more than she needed to, he did not protest. When she finished, she draped a sterile cloth over his midsection.

“I know you’re resourceful, but we learned a few tricks from the last time. I’ve got a security call button, and there are mechanisms to keep you from escaping even if you do get out of those straps. Don’t try to escape, or your situation could become much less comfortable,” Meta said. She studied his face while she said this; his cheek twitched but that was all. His eyes went to the ceiling, but the cage walls and gas dispersal system were well-concealed. The security camera on the ceiling was visible, but she didn’t tell him she would only turn it on when she left him alone. 

He stayed silent.

“You’ll be fed in the morning,” she said. Her shoes were wet and her lab coat was splashed and splattered. The floor was still slick though most of the water had already gone down the floor drain.

He didn’t answer.

She paused at the door. “I’m sorry he hurt you. I didn’t want him to do that.”

Suddenly afraid of what he might say to that, she turned on the security camera, turned off the overhead lights, and left him in the dim room.

* * *

Nicky kept looking to his left, as if Joe might appear. 

The security lighting around the edges of the room let Nicky see fairly well, even with the overhead lights off. He craned his neck and stretched as far as he could to see the room. He must be on the third floor, the one with the door locked and marked biohazard, because that was the only floor they hadn’t explored. He was fairly sure he was still at the Blessed Mary Medical Clinic.

The only exam table in the room was the one he was strapped to, and everything but the monitor was well away from him. He rocked on the table and determined it was bolted to the floor. The straps around his limbs, torso and neck were ribbing that could be cut, but not broken. He was naked except for the surgical drape across his middle. She’d touched him entirely too much during the bath, but hadn’t fondled him.

Nicky closed his eyes and took deep breaths, searching for that center of patience that made him such an excellent sniper and that always gave him a target and a weapon. 

Being able to aim well was about 40% of being a good sniper. The other 60% was patience and framing the kill shot. One didn’t always need a gun. There was always a weapon if you thought creatively.

Dr. Kozak had stroked his body, flushed when he’d shamed her, suggested they not be enemies, and then apologized for the murder.

Yes, he had a weapon, and the patience to set up a kill shot.

* * *

Nile was handcuffed, strapped into a helicopter jump seat with a bag over her head when she heard Joe gasping back to life. An instant later, a gunshot rang out and someone said something in German. Then a lot of people yelled in German.

She couldn’t break the handcuffs, and she couldn’t break the bones in her hand enough to get them out of the handcuffs. She also couldn’t see. When someone fell against her legs, she kicked out hard and heard Joe grunt.

“Sorry, Joe!”

“Nile!”

The next string of German was probably about not talking.

How had Joe gotten out of the seatbelt? Before she could ask, there was a sharp bang and then the air pressure dropped suddenly. Nile guessed the door to the helicopter was gone. Maneuvering, she got her chin on a buckle and tried to release it. More gunshots filled the helicopter, Joe yelled at her to brace herself, the engine suddenly didn’t sound so great, and then a knife severed the seatbelt strap and gouged into her shoulder.

Nile skidded across the floor and fell out of the helicopter, blind and bound. Her hands caught on something, dislocating both of her shoulders before the weight of her body broke the chain of the handcuffs and her hands were free and she was falling, scrabbling at the knot tied under her chin. Above her, she heard an explosion.

She was still struggling to get the bag off her head when she hit something as hard as concrete, then sank through it. Holy shit, she’d always heard that water wasn’t soft to land on if you fell from high enough, but now she had the broken bones to prove it. As she sank beneath the water, she gave up on the knot and tore at the bag instead. It ripped, enough for her to see the sun through the water above her. Nile kicked and cursed the weight of her boots.

Trying her damndest not to inhale, she broke the laces on her boots and kicked them off, then kicked for the surface where she inhaled a breath that was mostly water and set her to coughing hard from lungs already starved for air. The world turned orange and Nile ducked under the water and frantically kicked to swim away from being trapped under the wreckage of the burning helicopter. Someone grabbed her ankle and she kicked them in the face until they let go. Then, terrified she’d just kicked Joe, she dove back down until she could see it wasn’t Joe. Whoever it was floated motionless in a plume of blood.

On the surface again, Nile regained enough presence of mind to do recon. The water was brackish and warm, the sun was setting, wreckage was floating. Nile grabbed two orange life vests and kicked her way over to where a float skid had inflated. She tied the lead rope on the float skid around her waist, then boosted up as high as she could, looking for Joe.

She spotted two bodies floating in the wreckage, but neither of them came back to life. After paddling her float away from the wreckage, she started yelling. Joe yelled back. He swam to the float and threw his boots, knotted together by the laces, onto the float. 

“I’m going back under. I haven’t found Nicky yet,” he said.

“Joe, stop! Nicky wasn’t on the chopper with us,” Nile shouted.

Then she wished she could take it back because of the look on Joe’s face.

She kept talking. “They didn’t kill me. I saw them carrying Nicky through a door. Then I saw them carrying you and the people who got me followed you. Nicky wasn’t with us.”

“What door?”

“The stairwell. They kept him at the clinic.”

Joe scrabbled onto the float and collapsed face down. 

“We know where he is, Joe, we’ll get him back. Look! I can see a shoreline. Someone would have seen the crash. There will be a search plane any minute now.”

That brought Joe back up again. “We can’t be found by the officials.”

Search planes didn’t come, or at least not until they’d made it mostly to shore. By then it was dark. The shore was rocky. They picked their way over the rocks and into the undergrowth. Nile could hear an occasional car, far away.

“Any idea where we are?”

“Western shore of the Black Sea. With any luck, we’re still in Romania.”

“How do you know that.”

Joe waved his hand at the sky. “Stars.”

Nile added celestial navigation to the list of skills she needed to learn to be an immortal.

They spent the next hour breaking the handcuffs off their wrists and getting free from the restraints that still dangled. Nile’s shirt was torn but wearable, her pants were mostly intact. Joe’s pants were torn off at the knee on one side. He ripped the other side to match.

“Here. Let’s get some rest.” Joe kicked at branches and scraped up dead leaves and grasses to make a soft space. 

His breath was still coming in audible huffs. Nile knew it wasn’t physical pain; they’d long since healed from the gashes and broken bones from the crash. How could Joe get any sleep without Nicky clasped to his chest?

“I wish they’d kept me at the clinic and you had Nicky here.”

“Don’t say that. We’ll get him back.” Despite the brave words, his voice was broken around the edges. 

“Yeah, we’ll get him back.”

Joe propped himself up against a tree trunk. Nile curled in, her back pressed against his leg. Her feet were bare and her clothes were still damp.

She slept anyway.

* * *

Bloody fucking hell. 

The instant he had the banking access numbers from Booker, Copley was going to overhaul their safehouse system and they were going to prioritize indoor plumbing  _ and _ electricity. For now, however, he half-carried Andromache into the farmhouse with only half a roof and then went to figure out how the rusty pump in the yard worked.

He eventually gave it up as hopeless and went back into the house, discovering that the leather shiplap hinges on the door had rotted out and he had to set the door gently back into place and hope there wasn’t a strong wind.

“There’s no water.”

“I’ll show you how the pump works in the morning. Candles are in the . . . the,” she waved her hand vaguely in the direction of what might have been a kitchen before the roof caved in and buried it. 

Copley found candles by stepping on them. He decided to save their torches and batteries for a more exotic occasion than treating a gunshot wound and a broken ankle. Once he had all the candles in a semicircle, it felt rather like a seance. All he needed was a ghost. Perhaps the haunted look in Andy’s eyes was enough.

“Why do we have a full first aid kit?” Andromache asked him as he set out antiseptic wipes, steri strips and bandages, rows and rows of bandages.

No, he was not having that argument. He kept his mouth shut and started with the bullet wound in her shoulder. There was both an entry and exit wound. The wadded towel that she’d been using was only partly soaked with blood. Copley frowned as he looked at it, then folded the towel and pressed a clean corner against the wound.

“Why are you making that face?”

Copley signed. “Is arguing with me going to make you feel better?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Andromache said, in a voice that congratulated him for having figured out something difficult.

“You’re not bleeding as much as I expected.”

“And that’s making you frown?”

Copley sighed again. “It’s confusing.”

She twitched when he swabbed her shoulder with an antiseptic.

“When you and the team fought your way out of the building after Booker shot you, did you do anything strenuous? Any lifting, bending or twisting?”

“Nothing much.”

Copley looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

She shrugged with her other shoulder. “I might have killed a few guys and swung an axe a time or two. Maybe beat the shit out of a guy who wouldn’t get out of my way. Other than that, no. It made my stomach twinge, if that’s what you want to know.”

“The labrys in Merrick’s neck?”

“Who told you about that? Fine, yes, but I didn’t jump through the window with him. Nile has a flair for the dramatic. Did I ever tell you she stabbed me after I shot her?”

“Hold that,” Copley told her. 

She held the antiseptic wipe on her shoulder.

He unlaced her boot and pulled it off as gently as he could. She’d gone down hard when she’d finally collapsed, her leg obviously twisted the wrong way. Copley ran his hands over her shin, calf and ankle, searching for the break, asking where it hurt. She hissed an indrawn breath at him. He already knew she couldn’t put any weight on it, but either she had a really high pain tolerance, or the break wasn’t as bad as he’d thought at first.

He kept his suspicions to himself and wrapped her ankle and bandaged her shoulder by candlelight.

* * *

In the 1400s, the four of them spent a few decades in Tibet. Nicky learned dream yoga from Buddhist monks. Now it was called lucid dreaming, and it meant that Nicky knew he was dreaming and could decide what he dreamed about. The vividness of lucid dreams was so close to reality that it was a much needed vacation from what was really happening. 

In his dream, they were in Malta, on the balcony in the dish chair full of pillows that pushed both of them to cuddle in the center. Joe nuzzled his neck while Nicky fondled his ears. Joe was like a cat that way - he loved having his ears rubbed. 

“You are all right, habibi?” Nicky said softly.

“Mm-hmm. I’m eating peeled grapes and I have a new sketchbook. You’ll be my first drawing. You’re always my first drawing.” Joe had both arms around Nicky, draped mostly over the top of him. “And you?”

“They will feed me. I will be fine. I’m so glad you’re free,” Nicky said. “I have a plan to escape. Don’t endanger yourself by coming back for me.” 

“Tell me your plan after I kiss you.” Joe tangled them together further and found Nicky’s mouth with his own. 

The kiss was nothing but comfort and affection. Nicky kissed him back, hands stroking Joe’s neck and ears until he wriggled with pleasure and laughed into Nicky’s mouth when it tickled. They didn’t often get to indulge their playful natures during a job and the two of them made the most of it. Nicky’s wandering hands savored every second with Joe, drawing out the sweetness of it to sustain him through what was coming.

“What is your plan, amore mio?” Joe finally asked, fingers still scraping down Nicky’s bare back under his shirt to make him arch into Joe.

“She likes me,” Nicky said. “I will make her trust me. Then I will escape.”

“Come back to me, Nicky. Do anything you have to do, just come back.” Joe held still and held Nicky close.

“I promise,” Nicky said recklessly. He shouldn’t promise, not even in a dream.

Nicky kissed Joe again, trying to reassure him. He wished with all his heart that Joe truly was somewhere safe, eating grapes and delighted with a new sketchbook. The dream was fading into reality now. Around him, the gentle susurration of the Mediterranean Sea gave way to the monotone hum of artificial air and light. The linen pants transformed into a surgical drape. Joe faded from his arms, leaving them strapped to a table.

Nicky opened his eyes. From the dream, he drew strength and patience. Being a sniper took focus. Any job that took more than an hour developed into something like a relationship. He studied the target’s movements, habits and tics to predict what would happen and plan for changes. By the time Nicky pulled the trigger, he knew his target well, possibly better than his target’s friends or family. 

He had a different weapon this time, that was the only difference. 

“Good morning,” Nicky said when Dr. Kozak turned on the lights. She wore a white lab coat with pockets. The call button might be in those pockets.

She smiled. “Good morning to you too.”

“You promised me breakfast.” He spoke in Romanian, and gave her the barest hint of a smile.

“Soon. Just a few housekeeping matters.”

What she meant by that was a full workup of his vitals, and then she threaded a catheter into his penis and drained his bladder. Nicky stared at the ceiling and reminded himself that he had survived more humiliating experiences than this in the past 900 years. Not many, but surely there were some.

Breakfast was some sort of drink flavored thickly with vanilla and sugar. Dr. Kozak put the straw in his mouth and he drank it without grimacing, or he thought he did.

“Not your favorite?”

“Too sweet.”

“I’ll see what else I can find.”

Nicky nodded. “Thank you for not starving me.”

“What happens if you starve to death?” Dr. Kozak asked, sitting down on a little doctor stool with a notebook and pen.

Nicky cooperated with the interview, describing various ways he had died and how his immortality dragged him back to life, sometimes without fixing the problem that had caused his death in the first place. Yes, he felt pain. No, he didn’t think he felt pain as sharply as he did at first. “Part of pain is a warning system to get out of danger. I believe my mind has adapted to a different level of danger, so the pain has not changed but the fear is less.”

“I wonder if there is a way to measure that.”

“Please don’t torture me.”

“No, no of course not. I don’t plan to cause you any unnecessary pain.”

If Nicky could keep his mouth shut while she inserted a catheter, he could let that comment pass as well. 

“Now I have questions for you,” he said.

She looked away. “I probably can’t answer them.”

“Try for me,” he said, with a bit of a laugh in his voice. “What is your first name?”

She blinked.

“Come now. If we are to work together for years, maybe decades, you can’t expect me to call you Dr. Kozak all the time.”

“Meta. My name is Meta.”

He smiled at her. “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Meta. Both businesslike and beautiful. May I call you Meta?”

She smiled at the notebook in her lap. “If you wish.”

“What were you like as a child, Meta?”

“I’m . . . not sure that matters.”

“It matters to me. Let me guess. You were very intelligent and responsible, and because of that you were sometimes lonely and wished you had more friends. Ah! Don’t look at me like that! I am telling you what I was like as a child! I remember that far back, you know. It wasn’t very long ago for you. Tell me. Were you like me?”

Meta was not used to having personal conversations, that much was obvious. He coaxed her, offering bits of himself to spark a response from her. She had a shy smile, and her cheeks flushed seemingly at random. After about an hour, she said she had other work to do and needed to leave.

“May I listen to a radio?”

“Perhaps a CD player. I’ll see what I can find you.”

“Thank you, Meta.”

She almost smiled, and then her lips pressed together and she left without looking back.

He turned his face away from the security camera on the ceiling, looking to his left where Joe had been last time. 

_ Not so fast, _ Joe warned him.  _ She’ll see what you are doing. Slowly with this one. _

Nicky nodded.

* * *

“How drunk are you?” Copley demanded, pressing the receiver of the satellite phone hard against his ear as if that would make Booker easier to understand. He was across the clearing from the farmhouse where Andromache was making his life miserable.

“We can’t get drunk,” Booker slurred out. “We metabolize it too fast. Alcohol’s a poison you know. Arsenic can’t get me drunk either. I know. I tried.”

“Sit down,” Copley said. “Wait with me for ten minutes.” As fast as the immortals healed, he figured the alcohol should clear Booker’s system by then and they could have a coherent conversation.

“Does Andy know you’re calling me?”

“Not yet.”

“Did you tell her I was sorry? She hugged me before they all walked away. Joe and Nicky wouldn’t come near me, but Andy hugged me. She’s the boss, so they shoulda hugged me too.”

“Booker, put the damn bottle down.”

“It’s not empty yet.”

Fine, his idea to call Booker for help had been a bad one. No one could say ‘I told you so’ because no one knew he was calling.

“Hey, are you calling because they want me back?”

“They don’t want you back.”

“What?”

The connection was scratchy so Copley ended up yelling into the phone. “They don’t want you back!”

Oh fuck, now Booker was crying. “Why’d’ya call, man?”

Now he needed a reason besides this disastrous second dose of Booker’s betrayal and the idle thought that Booker might feel guilty enough to help. 

“I want the bank account information. You said you’d send it weeks ago.”

“Aw, man, they just want my money?”

“It’s not your money! It’s the team’s money!” And if they had that money, he could rent them an Airbnb that didn’t have ticks in the straw. Hell, he could rent an Airbnb with actual mattresses. And water. He still couldn’t get that damn pump to work. 

“Yeah, sure if that’s all they want from me,” Booker said with a sniff. “How are they doing? Everyone okay? Is Andy taking care of herself?”

“Everyone’s fine, Booker.”

“Yeah, they never did need me. They probably forgot all about me already. Is that why they want the money? Need to throw a party?”

Copley ran his hand over his head and pulled on his hair. “Is the bottle empty yet?”

“Almost. Want some?”

Copley could use a stiff drink, but Booker wasn’t someone he was going to share a drink with anymore.

“Just send me the bank account information, Booker,” Copley said.

He ended the call.

* * *

Nile and Joe were heading south along the shore road, and every time a car passed them, Joe tried to catch a ride. No one had stopped yet. They’d been walking for hours with no food and water only when they found a stream.

It was Nile’s turn to wear the boots. She argued with Joe about wearing the boots, because he’d saved his boots and hers were at the bottom of the Black Sea, but when she’d flat refused to wear his boots, he’d slung them over his shoulder and went barefoot too. They settled on taking turns. Nile didn’t think going barefoot was much worse than the blisters Joe’s boots gave her, but it made Joe feel better. 

She’d do anything to make Joe feel better. Damn, the man was a mess. It came in spurts. He’d be fine, remembering to talk to her in English, finding edible greens to eat as they walked, waving at cars that passed without stopping and predicting they’d get a ride from the next one. Then he’d be speaking in Italian and looking for someone who wasn’t there. He’d catch himself with a sheepish smile and laugh it off, but not before she saw the hurt and confusion that would flash over his face. 

The man couldn’t comprehend being apart from Nicky. Like, his brain could not physically remember that Nicky wasn’t there, and he kept slipping into normality - which is that Nicky was within earshot, within reach, and would be here the next time Joe spoke to him. Then it jarred him to remember that the world was all wrong and his center was missing.

So when he caught her hand as they walked and threaded their fingers together, Nile let him do it and braced for when Joe would realize he had the wrong hand.

“You don’t mind?” he asked.

That was even worse. He knew it wasn’t Nicky’s hand.

“I don’t mind, Joe, anything that helps.” The team was a lot more physical than Nile was used to. In the military, you never touched anyone, especially not anyone you worked with. You spent every waking minute avoiding sexual harassment and inappropriate relationships. 

These immortals piled onto each other like kittens. She’d never gotten hugged so much in her whole life. Hell, even if Nicky was here, Joe would probably hold her hand anyway.

“Did you leave anyone special behind? We talked about your family, but you never said anything about a lover.”

Nile shrugged. “That’s a story.”

“Tell me. Tell me who you love,” Joe begged her. “Give me something else to think about.”

“It’s not a story with a happy ending, but if you want to hear it.” Nile shrugged again. Joe had seen her cry, seen her die, fought beside her, comforted her after a nightmare and insisted she wear his boots. Why not tell him everything? “I’m asexual. You know what that means?”

He squeezed the hand he was holding. “There is very little I haven’t heard of, Nile. Yes, you are asexual, I understand.”

Nile smiled in relief, because it was so fucking awkward to try and convince a skeptic that she really did not feel sexual attraction even if the guy was as gorgeous as Joe was. “I’m heteromantic asexual. Me and my friends giggled about boys and had crushes and wanted to hold hands with boys. That was all great when we were twelve, and then we all got to be teenagers, and I still only wanted to hold a guy’s hand and they’re all, like, more, you know,” Nile waved her free hand around aimlessly.

Joe nodded.

“I told my mama and she was totally cool about it. She helped me look stuff up online and I found these great friends on Tumblr and it made me brave enough to go to my school’s LGBT club and tell them that I was queer too. It was all great when they thought I was a lesbian. But then this girl wanted to date me and I told her I was a heteroromantic ace and that was pretty much the end of me in the club. The advisor tried to be nice about it, but the others weren’t so great. I wasn’t queer enough, you know?” Nile said.

“I know,” Joe said.

The look in his eyes made her want to ask why he understood that, but she’d never gotten to tell this story before and it was spilling out of her. “I thought maybe I just needed to try sex, and they were right I was really straight but I was just a late bloomer. I started dating this guy named Tyrone. He was nice, really cute. I liked his beard and how big he was. We had the same sense of humor and his dad was military too, but still alive. I tried some stuff with him. You know. Just trying it out to see if I liked it once I did it.”

Nile checked. Joe was still paying attention and didn’t look like he thought she was an idiot.

“I didn’t like it. I’m still a virgin, but we tried some other stuff. Tyrone tried to be cool about it, but he’s a teenage guy. He didn’t like, assault me or anything, but he dumped me pretty fast. He said I was too hot to be frigid and he couldn’t be with me if I didn’t like sex.” That still stung. Everyone said to find someone who liked you for you, but if a guy could find someone he liked who also liked sex, then duh, she didn’t stand a chance.

“Then what?” Joe prompted.

“Then I didn’t belong anywhere. I wasn’t queer enough for the club and I wasn’t straight enough for anyone else. It really sucked for a few years.” Understatement. “So I joined the military. It’s cool. You’re supposed to have these really close friendships where you trust your lives to people and then never touch them or sleep with them. My kinda place, right? I did alright.”

“And now your place is with us,” Joe said.

“Yeah. Gay guys. Love you guys.”

She made him laugh. God, she could spend her whole long life listening to Joe laugh and watching his deep brown eyes crinkle up like that.

The next truck that passed stopped for them. Joe and the driver talked and then the driver waved at the back of the truck. It was an open top truck, about the size of a troop carrier. Nile climbed in and found a place to sit among the boxes, low out of the wind. Joe shifted boxes and sat next to her. 

“You okay with hugs and holding hands?” he asked.

“Yeah, I love that stuff,” Nile said.

He put an arm around her and settled in. After a while, the fatigue of hunger and the motion of the truck lulled her into a drowse. Joe too. Once he laid down, he pulled Nile with him. His arm draped over her. When he nuzzled her neck and murmured something in Arabic, she realized he was out cold. No one even halfway conscious could mistake her curves for Nicky’s lean body. 

She tucked his arm in against her and wished with all her heart and soul that they’d kept her at the clinic and that Joe had Nicky right now.

* * *

Fury and despair were old friends by now. Andy refused to quit and die until she’d gotten the team back. Fuck her broken ankle - she didn’t even remember breaking it. Copley said she broke it when she fell after someone shot her with a tranquilizer. What a shit stupid way to break an ankle. She should have broken it in a roundhouse kick to some asshole’s head. That would have been worth it, at least.

She wanted to yell all the time. Copley was doing this tiresome thing where he kept sighing at her and complaining that they didn’t have running water. There was a pump right out front - it’s not like he had to haul buckets from a stream. She’d had indoor plumbing for a century (give or take) and he’d had indoor plumbing for maybe forty years, so out of the two of them, she should be the whiniest about the lack of flush toilets, but did you see her complaining? No, you did not.

She wanted to yell at him.

She wanted to shake him.

She wanted to tell him everything that scared her.

She wanted him to tell her everything would be alright.

She wanted to believe him.

Why wasn’t he here? What was the point of having a satellite modem if you had to keep wandering around to make it work? Weren’t satellite modems supposed to work anywhere? Satellites circle the whole earth, so a few meters in Romania shouldn’t make that much of a difference, right?

Was he avoiding her? Why would he do that?

When she heard his footsteps, she set down the gun she was cleaning on the moldy old chair she was sitting on. She was just bored, that was all; she’d be glad to see a stray cat if it wandered in.

Copley came in clutching an open laptop and grinning from ear to ear. “Everything’s going to be alright, Andromache. Everything is just fine.” Even when he was excited, his voice was as smooth and slow as honey.

“It is?” Andy asked, and surprised herself by believing him.

Copley set the laptop on her lap, bumping her hip to sit next to her so they could both see the screen. The headline read, “No Survivors from Heli Crash in Black Sea.” 

“It crashed!” Andy shrieked. “They crashed the helicopter!” She scrolled through the article, pausing to read lines like, ‘flight path from northern Romania,’ and ‘privately owned helicopter,’ and ‘the rescue effort is now a recovery effort.’ 

“There are no survivors! They didn’t find them! They all escaped!” Andy knocked the laptop onto the floor when she turned to hug Copley. 

Copley dove to save the laptop and they ended up knocking heads together. He set down the laptop and hugged her properly. Then he held on and Andy relaxed against him. Copley was part of the team now; hugs were a thing. Maybe someday they’d even start using his first name.

“Where’s the rendezvous point?” Copley asked.

“Here,” Andy said. “This is the closest safehouse. We just wait here. Everyone shows up. We kiss the tissue specimens good-bye and go underground in Saõ Paulo. Brazil is a great country to get lost in. I can’t wait! We’ll teach Nile Portugese and Nicky can fry plantains!”

“Sounds like a plan. I checked for call-in messages. No one has called in yet.”

“It just crashed. Give them a few hours to find a phone.” Andy sighed happily, anger and despair banished like they never existed.

“Everything is going to be just fine,” Copley said.

“See? We don’t need running water to be happy!” Then she laughed at his expression.

* * *

The more he flirted with her, the more she touched him - a caress over his ribs after she’d taken part of his liver and the skin closed up, a hand to his cheek when she was guiding a straw to his lips, brushing the hair off his forehead. He asked her for things she was willing to give - a CD player, different flavors of protein drinks, warmer water when she washed him to prepare to take another tissue sample. She would give it to him and he would thank her. She would smile at him and he would glow with gratitude.

One day he asked for a blanket.

“Are you cold?” Meta asked.

“Not especially, but I like the feel of cloth against my skin.”

She ran eyes like a touch over his body and then went back to her notes.

Asking for something she didn’t want to give damaged the connection he was building with her. He needed something she wanted to give him. “My joints ache from being strapped down, unable to even shift position. Could the straps be loosened? Enough to give me a few centimeters.” Nicky tried to bend a knee, which meant the muscles in his legs flexed without moving anything.

Meta looked him over again and then away.

He’d known she wouldn’t grant that request. It was just a lead-in to the request she would want to grant. “Perhaps a massage would help.”

Meta’s eyebrows went up and she smiled. “I could do that much.”

“Please.”

Meta set down the tablet. Her hands were cool but not cold. She started at his calf, working her hands up the back of his leg before stroking and rubbing his knee and then his thigh.

Nicky closed his eyes. “You have a gentle touch.”

“I don’t mean to cause you pain, Nico. I am not a monster,” she replied quietly.

“All of us seek to ease suffering in our own way,” he allowed. “What do you hope to learn from my cells? Are they stem cells?” 

Trying to talk to Meta about personal topics like her childhood was not working. Perhaps she would speak more about her work. Yesterday, Meta had taken bone marrow with a large needle, and a segment of his liver. Today, she wanted cells from his corneas, but she hadn’t taken them yet.

“Do you know about stem cells?” She asked, surprised.

If Joe was here, he would tell her that they knew all about fire too. Also the wheel.

“I have studied biology and medicine. I remember when DNA was discovered, and then cell cultures, and then stem cells. Every new discovery was heralded as the end of disease. And yet disease persists,” Nicky said.

Meta smiled a small, self-satisfied smile. “I may change that.”

“Everyone thinks that. No one is right.”

Meta’s smile grew wider, with an edge of gloating to it. Her hands on his thigh moved higher and became possessive. “You’re the one who is wrong. I’ve already cured kidney cancer with your cells.”

“Tell me.”

Meta told him about Dietmar Otto and his miraculous recovery from end stage kidney cancer. “The cancer disappeared in only two hours. I told you I would change the world.”

It was a punch in the gut and he could not bring himself to congratulate her. He wanted her to stop touching him, but she appeared to enjoy it so he let it continue. Meta was drifting out of his crosshairs because his feelings were interfering with his focus. He gathered himself up and focused.

When she was massaging his biceps he said, “Perhaps I was wrong.”

“Do you still think I’m immoral?” She left off rubbing his bicep and took his jaw, forcing him to look at her.

_ I hate her, Joe. _

_ Say what you need to say, amore mio. _

“You want to do good in this world, as do I.”

“You and I will do much good together, won’t we Nico?”

“Yes.”

She let go of his jaw and Nicky turned his head to the left.

About mid-afternoon, hours after Meta had left him for the day, Bridger arrived. The first thing he did was to break the CD player that Meta had brought for him by smashing it on the ground. 

Bridger pulled up the stool and sat down. “Where’s the safehouse?”

Nicky kept his gaze on the ceiling. “The fact that you need to know means that my friends are safe and you cannot find them. I thank you for telling me this.”

Bridger shot him the face, through the cheek so he didn’t die. “I’ll shoot you every time you don’t answer the question.”

After his cheek grew back together, Nicky said, “I hope you brought enough ammunition.”

“When the ammo is gone, I get out my knives.”

“Do what you will. You are not the first. You will not be the last.” Nicky set his mind to accept without feeling, a trancelike state he found useful for situations like these, and looked at the ceiling.

_ I am glad you are not here to see this, my Yusuf. _

_ I would share even this with you, my Nicolò. _

Nicky did not try to be stoic. Refusing to scream, gasp or cry out took concentration that he needed to maintain the separation between what was happening to his body and his soul. He died many times, both by bullet and by knife. Many more times, Bridger cut ribbons out of him. Nicky strained against the straps holding him down and Bridger strangled him. Again.

“What are you doing? Get out! Get away from him!”

Nicky was not dead when Meta came back, though he was close to it. Bridger was disemboweling him this time.

“I’ll stop when the fucker answers me,” Bridger snarled. He was soaked in Nicky’s blood; blood had splashed up to his hairline and ran in rivulets down his arms.

“Then keep going,” Nicky said. Meta’s interruption had pulled him back to full awareness of what was happening to him. He wished to die for a brief respite.

He saw her run out of the room before he died. When he came back, there were several people in the room. An older man he had not seen before was wielding a tablet and shouting at Bridger. A woman’s voice came from the tablet. Meta was in the corner, watching Nicky instead of the confrontation.

It ended with both men leaving. Meta locked the door behind them with a key she hung around her neck. Then she came to him with frightened eyes and a pinched mouth.

“Nico, I should not have left you.”

He blinked and did not restrain a shudder. When she placed a hand on his gore-streaked face, he turned and nuzzled her palm with his lips. She wasn’t wearing gloves. When he saw tears in her eyes, he asked, “Meta, would you tell me the truth? He asked about the safehouses. Does this mean my friends are safe? I would beg you for this information on my knees, if I could.”

“Two got away. Joe and the black woman were captured. They were taken to separate locations in China.”

It had the ring of truth to it, and if she was going to lie, she would have said all of them were captured. Nicky took a deep breath and a tear streaked down his bloody face to his ear. Joe and Nile were suffering the same way he was; it broke him in a way that Bridger never could.

“I won’t keep you forever, Nico, just until we understand why you can’t die. Perhaps I can find a way for you to talk to your friends with a tablet once in a while. Would you like that? And think of all the good we will do together, the lives we will save!”

Nicky drew in a breath and centered himself on his goal.

“Tell me again of Dietmar Otto,” Nicky said. “Tell me the good we are doing.”

She talked of Dietmar and made predictions for how Nicky’s bone marrow would cure leukemia and his corneas would cure some forms of blindness. 

As she washed the blood and gore from his body, Nicky said, “I have medical training. If you will show me the experiments you are conducting, I may be able to help you. No matter how smart someone is, it always sparks new ideas to talk with someone. I will work with you, Meta.”

She gave him a measured work from where she was washing his fingers. “Why? I am keeping you prisoner.”

“I have always wanted to help people, to lessen the suffering in the world. This is not my first choice; you know that. But since it is my only choice, I want it to achieve the most good possible. Besides, I think it will be interesting. I have wondered about why I don’t stay dead, but I have had no way to study and discover an answer.” He kept his expression open while he said this, mixing truth with what she wanted to hear.

“I knew we could be friends, if you would just see what I wanted to accomplish,” Meta said with a hint of triumph in her voice. “I got to choose which one of you I kept, and I’m glad I chose you.”

“I’m glad you did too,” Nicky said.

* * *

The first truck ride took them inland, away from the resorts that sprinkled the coast. The driver dropped them off in a village west of Constanta. Joe wanted to find food and clothes before they found another ride. They were already attracting suspicious looks. 

Joe spoke the language fine, but the first person he asked for food called him a foreigner, among other things, and told him to go home, among other things.

“Joe?” Nile asked softly.

“We’ll find someone who is in a better mood,” Joe said.

“I may not speak the language, but I know what hatred sounds like. We look like we escaped from a refugee camp. What if they call the cops? We don’t have passports.”

Joe nodded. The marketplace was crowded, everyone white, people starting to stare and point, none of them as ragged as he and Nile were. Her shirt was torn down the back and she was barefoot. His pants were ripped off at the knees. Their clothes had dried on them after they’d gotten out of the Black Sea. Nile’s cornrows were coming loose. His hair and beard were frizzy and unkempt.

He was so hungry, not just for food but for Nicky. Could you starve for a person? In all his long life, Joe had never died of a broken heart. Not yet. He needed to pull it together if he was going to get back to Borsa and find Nicky. He would. He just needed a minute to breathe. And something to eat.

“Let’s get out of here before someone calls the police on us,” Nile said, taking him by the elbow and steering him away.

They left the marketplace, looking for a place they could hide until dark. Then they would steal clothes and food and find another ride to Bucharest.

Partway down a lane, Joe heard someone calling after him in a language that wasn’t Romanian. By the time his tired brain had identified Turkish, the man had already switched to Arabic. Joe answered him in Arabic.

The man caught up to them and gave Joe and Nile a raking once-over and then frowned. “I will not ask what you are doing here. You make us look bad, begging in the marketplace. Come with me.”

Joe’s every attempt at conversation was met with curt replies. It rattled him. Joe was likable - that was one of his strengths. He talked and laughed and people responded to that. This man, who finally gave his name as Emir but would not introduce his wife, just shook his head at Joe’s comments and compliments.

Finally, Emir said, “Do you want to tell me honestly what you’re doing here?” He went on without waiting for Joe’s answer. “I can’t risk trouble with the authorities. I’m not going to report you, but the less I know about you, the better. Quickly now.”

Joe couldn’t fault him for that. Emir’s wife set soup, bread and tea on the table. Joe and Nile thanked them profusely. After they’d eaten, Emir gave Joe pants and a thin cotton button down shirt. Emir was shorter than Joe, but the pants fit around the waist and the shirt had all its buttons. Nile accepted a skirt and cotton blouse with a smile, thanking Emir’s wife again when she handed her sandals as well. 

After they had eaten and changed clothes, Emir drove them several kilometers out of town, handed them sandwiches, and perfunctorily wished them well.

“We’re better off than we were,” Nile observed as Emir disappeared back down the road. 

Joe shook off the malaise. “Yes, you’re right to keep our spirits up. We’re on the road to Bucharest, also. Just a few hundred kilometers to the west, and we’ll be at our safe house. There, we will have money and clothes and can make plans. We are close, Nile!”

“It’s too bad we couldn’t call someone. You guys have phone numbers set up the way you have safe houses, right?”

“We have call-in numbers, yes, but we need a burner phone. I wouldn’t make that call from a borrowed phone. Booker set up those phone numbers, and he might be able to track someone if we use his system. What if he sold that to Merrick?”

Nile and Joe turned west and started walking. 

“You’re really never going to trust him again, are you?”

The concern in Nile’s voice defused Joe’s flash of anger. She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand because no one had told her.

“This wasn’t the first time he betrayed us, Nile. The first time was in Germany, in the 1930s.”

As they walked, Joe told a story he had never told anyone before.


	8. Berlin 1930s

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: racism, negging and gaslighting

The 100-year anniversary of Jean-Pierre’s death hit Booker particularly hard. Not only was the universe cruel enough to curse him with immortality, but it killed all three of his sons before they even had a chance to be old. Jean-Pierre’s death from cancer was the worst because Jean-Pierre lived long enough to know his father wasn’t aging. The hatred in his son’s eyes the last time he saw him in hospital broke Booker’s heart and soul.

He rather thought he was fated, since then, to do what he did that year.

Science had gotten obsessed with improving the human race. This new branch of science, eugenics, developed in the United States, swept through Germany in the early 1930s. Scientists and doctors were studying and encouraging healthy, intelligent people with desirable traits to produce more children. As a corollary, they were trying to discourage undesirable people from reproducing. Everyone was an armchair geneticist these days.

The whole idea drew Booker in. If his immortality could be inherited, he could have saved his own sons. Could these scientists figure out the secret of what made him immortal? It was too late to save Jean-Pierre, but perhaps he could save someone in Jean-Pierre’s place. Perhaps if he could atone for Jean-Pierre’s death in that way, the guilt would stop eating him alive and he wouldn’t see the hatred in his son’s eyes anymore.

* * *

Joe was pleased to get the telegram from Booker, asking for a favor. Of course it came for both of them, but it was written to Joe. Joe didn’t know Booker as well as he should. The man had been in their lives for a little more than a century, and yet there seemed to be a distance that Joe couldn’t bridge. Just when Joe thought they were connecting, Booker would turn it into a joke. Or Joe would try to join in the games and activities that Nicky came up with, and Booker would edge him out. Joe would ask questions to get to know him on a level other than working together, and Booker would shrug and shut him down. It was never obvious enough to ask about it. Maybe Booker didn’t see what he was doing. Joe tried not to be so sensitive. People had different ways of interacting, and surely Booker didn’t mean anything by it. 

“Look, Nicky! Booker wants our help.” Joe brandished the telegram.

Nicky read it and his mouth twitched with a smile when he saw how it was worded. “He asks for your help, you mean. Is it okay if I come with you?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, smiling like a fool. 

They packed a bag and bought a train ticket to Berlin the next day.

To Joe’s surprise, Andy wasn’t there. “She went to Greece to check on that hospital she donated all that money to,” Booker said.

Booker had an apartment with both electricity and running water. He set teacups in front of Joe and Nicky and then flipped the switch on the wall, filling the room with a yellow glow. The radiator put out a fair amount of heat, enough that Joe unwound his scarf. He’d gotten used to winters in northern Europe; he never liked them, but he’d gotten used to them.

“I want you to hear me out,” Booker began, looking at Joe.

“Sure,” Joe said immediately.

“Lately we’ve been getting into a lot of skirmishes that are about politics. Honestly, I don’t care who rules the world. I’m more concerned with what life is like for ordinary people.”

Joe nodded. The entire team was sick of politics. Different people; same patterns, every generation. They tried to keep their heads down during wars and just rescue people rather than trying to win any battles. 

“Science is the way to do that. Inventions like the telephone and automobiles are helping, but medical science, Joe, medical science is discovering all sorts of things to help people. It’s not like you guys are used to - bloodletting and bodily humors and stuff that was more magic than science. Things are changing now,” Booker said earnestly. “There might be a different way we can help people - not fighting anymore. Would you want to help people a different way?”

“I want to apprentice to a doctor,” Nicky said. 

Booker ignored him. It was a little odd to Joe, watching Booker treat Nicky the way he usually treated Joe. Booker had barely glanced at Nicky beyond a brief greeting and now he was edging him back out of the conversation. It made Joe feel better, in a perverse sort of way, to see Booker’s behavior from this other perspective and know he wasn’t just imagining things.

“I’ve met a guy, a doctor, who understands science. His name’s Paul Merrick. His dad started a company that produces medicines. They’ve got dozens of microscopes. Do you know what microscopes are?” Booker asked.

“Yes, we’ve even looked through them,” Joe said, gesturing to both himself and Nicky. 

Nicky drew breath to say something, but Booker went on. “Dr. Merrick showed me blood cells under a microscope. It was amazing! I started thinking, maybe what’s different about us is in our blood. Maybe doctors could look at it under a microscope and figure out what makes us immortal. And if they can do that, maybe they could use our blood to heal people. What would you think of that?”

Booker kept talking. Joe wanted to make this connection with Booker. The ideas were interesting. He already knew about blood transfusions, and the way you could give someone another person’s blood and save a life. It was miraculous, really, that someone could share their life force with someone else. Why wouldn’t that apply to them too?

Then the enormity of what Booker was saying hit him. “You told people about us?” That was dangerous. It had been hundreds of years since he and Nicky had been killed for sport by people who knew their secret, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you forgot. Ever since Quynh, the team had gotten paranoid about people finding out their secret. 

“No, do you think I’m stupid? Come on, Joe!” Booker said with a shake of his head. “I didn’t say a thing to them about not being able to stay dead. Look, it’s simple enough. When someone gets injured, some people heal and some people don’t. And people heal at different rates, right? We all know that. All I said was that I always heal, and I heal fast. I cut my arm a few times to convince them. That’s all it is. They’re finding things in blood that makes it clot. Everyone knows that skin grows together again. They just think it’s a bit faster in me so they want to study how it works.”

Joe exchanged a glance with Nicky. Booker was skating close to the edge of danger. Booker had never been captured or tortured or killed by people who knew their secret; he didn’t know the risk he was taking.

“You shouldn’t have told anyone,” Joe said, “not without asking everyone.”

“What are you, the immortality police? Come on, Joe, aren’t you curious about why we live while everyone else dies? Don’t you want to help people?” Booker said with a sardonic smile that suggested that Joe was overreacting.

“We choose how we help people,” Nicky said, breaking into the conversation.

“And you can still make that choice! Hell, guys, I didn’t mean to turn this into a huge deal. You know what? Forget it. You want to go to a concert instead? I can get tickets.” Booker landed his teacup into the saucer harder than necessary and poured alcohol from his flask into the cup. He downed the shot and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Joe shot Nicky a look asking him to back off. Booker wasn’t suggesting anything drastic. Doctors helped people - they didn’t lock them up and experiment on them. Booker was right - science was changing the world more than fighting ever could. Perhaps they could be part of that.

“Would we have to stay at the hospital in case someone needs our blood?” Joe asked.

“No, it’s even easier than that,” Booker reassured him. “We go to the hospital, Dr. Merrick takes some blood with a needle, and then we can leave. The doctors keep the blood in a refrigerator until they use it.”

“Why do you need Joe to give them blood? Why don’t you do it?” Nicky asked.

Booker chuckled. “I have. They want samples from other people as well, so I said I’d ask my friend, that’s all.” He poured more tea for them and added another shot of alcohol to his own cup.

Joe glanced at Nicky. His lips were pressed together, as if he was searching for something to dislike about what Booker had said. There was no need for that. Booker considered him a friend, that was the important part, and he wasn’t asking for anything difficult.

“Yes, this doctor can have some of my blood,” Joe agreed.

“Great, we’ve got an appointment tomorrow morning,” Booker said.

That evening was one of the best Joe had ever spent with Booker. They talked and laughed about memories and books. They cooked pasta together and marveled at how much science and technology had changed the world in the past 100 years. Joe was both relieved and happy to have finally made a friend out of the man who had held himself so aloof for the past century.

* * *

Joe had his good points. Booker already knew that. He was cheerful and easygoing. If someone needed to skip a meal or take the most uncomfortable spot to sleep, it would be Joe. He was just that kind of guy. Nicky had a good thing going with him. If Booker’s wife had been a little more accommodating like that, maybe they would have gotten along better.

“Do they want my blood too?” Nicky asked in Italian.

Booker answered in French. It was best to use northern European languages in Germany nowadays. “Sure, you can give them some blood. They’re most interested in Joe, but yours is fine too.”

“Why me?” Joe asked. 

They were riding a streetcar to Merrick Pharmaceuticals, the three of them holding onto ceiling straps when the streetcar went around a corner.

Booker tucked his scarf in tighter before answering. “I don’t know if you’ve been following what’s going on in Germany right now, but this new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, is spouting some crazy racist stuff. Eugenics is everywhere. Have you heard the word Aryan? An Aryan is a blond, blue-eyed person, from any country, and the Nazis are teaching that Aryans are superior to anyone else. These doctors are really impressed with my ability to heal - it’s the best thing they’ve ever seen, they said so. They were claiming it was some superior genetic ability because I’m Aryan. And I’m telling them that my brown friend from Africa -- Arabia -- wherever you’re from, can do the same thing. They don’t believe me! I needed you to come in and prove me right.”

Joe looked . . . weird. Nicky’s jaw clenched.

“Oh, come on guys,” Booker started.

The streetcar stopped and the conversation paused while a whole group of people existed. No one gave Joe a second look because everyone was bundled up in scarves and hats in the bitter winter weather; he looked just like everyone else if you didn’t look too closely.

“Look, it’s a way to show them they’re wrong, do you get it? Maybe they’ll see that they’re wrong that Aryans are superior. I’m trying to do the right thing. Help me out a bit, would you?” Booker said. If he lived another thousand years, he was never going to understand Joe and Nicky. Sometimes they just got touchy about the weirdest things. They never made any effort to understand him. Being immortal was really shitty, and having these two acting like it was a good thing didn’t help. They were nice to him, sure, in the same way his business partners had been nice to him before busting him for forgery, and the way the men in his regiment pretended to be his friends before chasing him down as a deserter. You can’t really trust men who like each other more than they like you, that’s what Booker had decided.

Joe and Nicky looked at each other. They had a weird mishmash of Italian and Arabic that only they could understand, but sometimes they didn’t even speak out loud. Booker stood there on the sidewalk, freezing his ass off, and took a swig from his flask while he waited for Joe and Nicky to finish whatever non-verbal conversation they were having and condescend to remember his presence again.

“Fine,” Joe said at last, his eyebrows drawn together in a scowl.

“Look, it’s not that big of a deal,” Booker said with a sigh. “I don’t know why you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset,” Joe said.

Booker rolled his eyes. “I don’t care if these doctors think only Aryans can heal fast. I just thought you might want to help fight racism. All we do is kill people and get killed. Sometimes I get sick of that. There are other ways to help. I thought this was a good idea. I was wrong. Let’s go get coffee instead.” He turned and walked a few steps before realizing Joe and Nicky weren’t following him.

“I said I’d do it,” Joe said when Booker came back.

“Fine, your choice,” Booker said.

* * *

Getting past all the receptionists and orderlies took about an hour. Joe decided that the curious looks were as bad as the hostile looks. Had they really never seen a black beard before? Why did so many of them reach out and touch it like he was a dog to be patted?

Before a battle, Joe always felt queasy and like he was about to jump out of his skin. He kept feeling like that now, but then there was nothing to do but wait in another little room and talk to another woman who asked him questions and wrote things down. Nicky paced. Booker drank. 

At last, a blond, blue-eyed man swept into the room, followed by a parade of orderlies and nurses, and introduced himself as Dr. Merrick. The small medical room was suddenly claustrophobic with people, all of them looking at Joe.

“Is this your Arabian friend?” Dr. Merrick asked Booker.

“I’m from Tunisia,” Joe said, but Booker and Dr. Merrick were having a conversation that involved medical terminology in German that Joe couldn’t entirely follow.

“And you are?” Dr. Merrick asked Nicky.

“This is another friend of mine,” Booker said, cutting off Nicky. “He’s got the same ability to heal. We kind of teamed up.”

“Alright, we’ll need a demonstration,” Dr. Merrick said, writing something down.

That was all the warning Joe got before three orderlies grabbed him and one sliced his forearm to the bone with a scalpel. Joe cried out in Arabic and Nicky jumped forward. Booker and an orderly grabbed Nicky to keep him out of Dr. Merrick’s way.

Dr. Merrick leaned forward, peering at Joe’s arm through a magnifying glass. If there hadn’t been one man holding his shoulder and another one pinning his wrist to a table, Joe would have punched him.

“Fascinating,” Dr. Merrick pronounced after the wound had closed. He selected a large pair of tweezers from a pile of instruments and then yanked out a patch of hair from Joe’s arm. 

Joe yelped. The men holding him tightened their grip on him. Joe’s stomach started churning harder with pre-battle nausea.

“The hair doesn’t regrow,” Dr. Merrick said. “Make a note of that. The body regeneration appears selective. Let’s check his fingernails.”

Joe balled his hand into a fist before Dr. Merrick could rip out a fingernail. “All you wanted was some blood.” Joe’s German wasn’t as good as his French.

Dr. Merrick regarded him curiously, as if he’d found a talking dog. “No, we’ll want much more than that. Tell me, have you ever fathered children?”

Joe tried to stand up and the men holding him shoved him back down onto the stool.

Then two of the men were on the ground, one of them bleeding heavily from his nose, and Nicky had backed Dr. Merrick up against the wall. “We’re leaving now,” he said as the metallic echoes from the falling equipment faded.

The third man holding onto Joe put his hands in the air and scrambled away from him. That was a disappointment; Joe really wanted to hit someone right now.

“Do you have to be so dramatic?” Booker asked Nicky with a sigh.

Joe hit Booker.

* * *

It didn’t matter that his broken nose healed within seconds; it was the principle of the thing. They didn’t hurt each other. Ever. Well, training exercises when Andy felt like it, but other than that, they didn’t hurt each other. Joe owed him an apology. And he probably would apologize, but Nicky kept getting in the way, insisting that Booker should apologize first.

“Shit, Nicky, it’s not like I forced him! I gave him every chance to back out. Joe didn’t have to do anything,” Booker argued.

“You pressured him!” Nicky argued back.

Nicky was going to break his own jaw if he kept clenching it like that. Joe was slumped on the couch; Nicky was striding around the apartment like a wind-up toy. 

Booker put his elbows on the table and took a swig from his flask before snapping back, matching Nicky’s tone. “I just told him what was going on. Are you trying to say Joe can’t make his own decisions? I said he didn’t have to do it. I’m trying to help! Germany is really freaking me out right now. Maybe someone should prove the Aryans aren’t the super-race they think they are. Excuse me for trying!”

Nicky stared at him like he’d never seen him before.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” Joe said.

That stopped Nicky in mid-stride. He looked at Joe, his eyes going all soft. No one had ever cared about Booker like that. Then he turned to look at Booker, and there was nothing soft in his eyes at all. “Well?”

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way I thought they would,” Booker said with a shrug, and took another swig.

“That’s not an apology!” Nicky said. 

Fuck, it took a lot to piss off Nicky, but he sure didn’t let go once he had his back up. Booker just wanted them to go away until they calmed down and could see that nothing bad had actually happened. They’d been through worse - they told stories about it sometimes. 

“It had the words ‘I’m sorry’ in it, Nicky. That’s an apology in every language I speak,” Booker said with exaggerated patience.

“Let’s just go, Nicky,” Joe said, his voice overflowing with exhaustion. Maybe Joe got sick of Nicky sometimes too. “We can check in on Andy.”

Booker slammed his flask down on the table. “And now you’re threatening me?”

Joe looked taken aback. “What?”

“Someone scratches your arm and you gotta run tell Andy about it?”

“No, I wasn’t going to tell Andy about it.” Joe was looking between him and Nicky like he couldn’t figure out what was going on. The way those two played off each other was really over the top sometimes.

Booker snorted. “You’ll wait until the next time you’re mad at me, then you’ll tell Andy? Is this going to be the threat hanging over my head for the rest of our centuries? If I do something you don’t like, you’ll tell Andy?”

“We’re not going to tell Andy,” Joe said quizzically, looking at Nicky.

“You have to get Nicky’s permission for that?” Booker asked.

“I’m not going to tell Andy, Booker, this is between you and Joe. You owe him an apology, whether Andy knows about this or not,” Nicky said.

“And I said I already apologized,” Booker reminded them.

Joe had Nicky by the hand, pulling him away, murmuring in that mishmash language of theirs. Nicky stalked off and threw things back into the bag they’d brought with them. Joe gathered up their scarves and gloves.

Booker sighed. He’d tried. It’s too bad things didn’t work out, but he ought to get credit for trying.

* * *

For the next few weeks, Nicky hovered. He made Joe’s favorite foods, gave him foot rubs, laughed at all his jokes too much and would have gotten him off four times a night if Joe had that much stamina. It helped. Nicky’s kindness wrapped up Joe in warmth and gave him a place to get his bearings back. Joe’s natural cheer resurfaced and the sting of what Booker had done faded. It didn’t disappear though; Booker didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, and that meant he might do it again.

Nicky disagreed. “He knows it was wrong. How could he not? Anyone could see it was wrong. I told him so. He just didn’t want to say it. I’m sure he’s learned his lesson and will never do anything like that again.”

Joe wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t have anything he could point to - just a feeling. He wasn’t the sort to hold grudges, and the persistent suspicion of Booker bothered him. Joe’s feelings didn’t make any difference anyway. Booker was part of their small team and there was no way to change that. Joe would have to make the best of things.

Their next job together was a pleasant surprise. Joe had been braced for a nasty confrontation. But Booker didn’t even mention Berlin, but fought side by side with Joe the way he’d always done. They cleared out the cache of mustard gas from the Great War, working themselves to exhaustion every day for a week, sharing food and wishing for clean socks. Relieved, Joe assumed things were going to be fine now. Not everyone apologized. Perhaps Nicky was right and Booker had learned his lesson anyway.

“Here, now stop whining,” Andy said, tossing them something soft and gray before walking away with their contact.

It turned out to be clean socks. Joe was overjoyed. He sat down on a low stone fence next to Booker to change socks.

“So you really didn’t tell her?” Booker asked, peeling muddy socks off his feet.

“No,” Joe said. “I said I wouldn’t. This is between us.”

Booker shook his head and huffed out a disgusted breath. “I really don’t understand why you’re so touchy.”

Joe stared at Booker, wondering what on earth he’d said to make Booker say that.

“Get over it, Joe, it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

Joe cleaned off his feet as best he could before putting on his clean socks. His mind whirred, trying to come up with something to say. 

Nicky came bounding up with his own pair of socks and a smile on his face. “Clean socks!” he announced.

Joe grinned at him and the smile fell off Nicky’s face. He glanced between Joe and Booker, his mouth pinching. Sometimes it was really inconvenient to have a partner who could read you so well.

“We were saying the same thing!” Joe said jovially, and nudged his shoulder playfully against Booker’s.

“Doesn’t take much to make me happy. I’m a simple man,” Booker said, nudging Joe back.

Joe kept chatting, trying to defuse whatever might be flickering in Nicky’s mind. This didn’t need to be awkward. Joe knew where he stood with Booker now, and he would just accept it and work around it. It’s not like he could get away from him.

After that, Joe hung around the edges of Nicky’s interactions with Booker, being the audience without trying to participate anymore. He and Booker could fight together and work together. He didn’t need anything else.


	9. Plans

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cw: dubcon kissing and touching; a brief mention of past child molestation in one paragraph

“Before I was captured, I saw filing cabinets on one of the other floors. What is in the filing cabinets? Why so many of them?” Nicky asked one day. The entire floor had been filled with rows of filing cabinets, probably thirty cabinets. He’d taken a second to read the labels before Joe hurried them away. Some labels were cities in Poland and Germany. Others were traumatic medical conditions: gangrene, amputation, burns.

Meta paused before answering, and he saw her doing calculations in her head the way she did when she was measuring out what to tell him. “Records of medical experiments.”

“Records too unimportant to be scanned into a computer? Why keep them at all?”

“They are records of experiments on humans, mostly by the Nazis in the 1930s and as many records as we could save from the concentration camps,” Meta said casually, as if she were discussing mice. “There is much to learn from the data, so you needn’t look at me like that.”

Nicky turned his head to the left where Joe was not there.

“You were not a surprise to us, you know,” Meta said, all self-assurance and bustle. “We knew about you in the 1930s.”

“Dr. Paul Merrick,” Nicky said.

“You remember him? He was a brilliant man. It’s too bad he didn’t have more to work with. He searched for you and your friends, especially once the Germans started collecting people. I read the records - part of the concentration camp inprocessing was to slash the arm with a scalpel and observe if the healing took more than a few seconds.”

Nicky stared at the ceiling and kept his expression impassive. All those terrified people being forced into concentration camps: Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the handicapped - having their arms sliced open along with being robbed, branded and dehumanized in an effort to find an immortal. One more atrocity and indignity piled on so many others. One more effect that Booker didn’t intend. Nicky hadn’t thought of that reason for secrecy before - the search for more like them would cause so much pain and suffering and find nothing.

“That sort of human experimentation is illegal. It’s illegal even to have the notes and records. I disagree. We can learn so much and no one is suffering for it anymore. Why must we destroy a source of knowledge simply because we don’t approve of how it was gained? It’s unfortunate we can’t release those experiments to other doctors so more research can be done. Instead, the records must stay off computers lest someone starts wailing about the Nuremberg Code. It makes research inconvenient and slows progress,” Meta said.

“Is that why your notes about me are on clipboards and paper?” Nicky asked.

“Yes. The Merricks insist on it. The official corporate activity is kept on computers, and then there are the records and experiments that must be kept from prying eyes. The Merricks have an entire network offline, with post office boxes and letters and paper filing cabinets,” Meta said.

“Post office boxes?” Nicky reached for the change of subject.

“Yes, P.O. Box 405223 in Kyiv is part of the Merricks’ post office box network. When you escaped from the facility in London, I put the tissue specimens in a post box and mailed it. I left the address label where you would find it when you came back to look. That was my idea. We knew exactly where to look for you,” Meta said. 

“Clever,” Nicky said, because she seemed to expect to be complimented. In the bleak hours of the night, he had wondered if Copley had set them up. It was good to know that he hadn’t. 

Meta stopped talking. Nicky couldn’t bring himself to flirt with her, not with the thought of the filing cabinets, and the records of misery and cruelty they contained, occupying his mind. 

He remembered asking Joe if they should leave their tissue samples with the doctors. After all, they were no longer suffering, and the doctors might learn something. Meta had changed his mind. If something began as immoral, it stayed immoral. 

It wouldn’t be enough to simply escape from this place. He needed to destroy it.

* * *

“Nico, you will be happy to hear this,” Meta announced one morning. Mornings had an extra bit of bubble to them, ever since Nico had started working with her instead of merely suffering and trying to make her feel guilty.

“Make me happy,” he replied.

Her heart bubbled a bit more, because she had learned to read his barely-there smiles and notice the way his eyes warmed when he looked at her. “In the past two days, we have cured a girl with leukemia, and a man with chronic hepatitis.”

“Cures already? So fast?”

“Yes, I told you I would change the world! We,” she corrected herself, “we will change the world.” She could be generous in the lab; outside the lab, all the credit was hers.

“Do you have pictures? May I see the girl and the man we have cured together?”

Meta scrolled through the tablet she was holding and showed him a picture of a girl, about twelve, and a man in his forties. The girl was the daughter of billionaires; her parents had paid a small fortune for the cure on the strength of Dietmar Otto’s recommendation. The man had paid somewhat less, only €4 million, but he had signed on to work at Merrick Pharmaceuticals with a Non-Compete/Non-Disclosure Agreement even more draconian than the one she had signed in exchange for Merrick paying her way through medical school. He’d essentially sold himself to Merrick Pharma in exchange for a cure.

Iselda Merrick was very pleased with her, and with the news that she had enough tissue samples to begin treating many other forms of cancer. Once Meta had samples of Nico’s digestive tract, they would begin treating chronic digestive diseases. Millionaires and billionaires would pay dearly to be able to enjoy their lavish lifestyles again. If she took enough of his intestines in one surgery, she could perhaps get enough for quite a while and spare him more frequent surgeries. She took no pleasure in hurting him.

“This is a victory for us,” Nico said. “I am happy about this, truly I am. I would kiss your hand if I could, in congratulations and celebration.”

She laughed out loud at that. He had such a sweet turn of phrase. She wished she could have met him at medical school. He would not have been like Boris, who tried to pull her focus away from her studies. She had easily chosen her studies over Boris and never looked back.

“I’ll kiss you instead,” she said impulsively, and kissed him on the forehead. 

“You can do better than that,” he said, and the warmth in his eyes turned hot.

Did he mean what she hoped he meant? Hesitant, wondering if she really had understood him, she brushed his lips with her own. He had a few centimeters slack in the strap over his neck, and tipped his chin to follow her lips when she drew back. 

“Do it again,” he said.

That was more than enough invitation for Meta. She put both hands on his face and kissed him tenderly, and then passionately. He kissed her back. The sensations that flooded her threatened to drag her under. She loved only her work - and he was her work. She could love him and want him as passionately as she wanted her medical degree, her publications and her Nobel Prize. He had no existence apart from her work and she could love him with all her heart and soul.

“Unstrap my hand. Just for a moment,” he whispered. “You have my word I want only to touch you.”

“You promise?” she asked, desperately wanting to believe him.

“My word of honor.”

Against her better judgment, but with the heat of her blood stirring her, she unfastened the buckle over his arm. He raised his hand and brushed the back of his fingers against her cheek, under her chin, and then guided her in for another kiss. His hand held her head against him; she was bent over him awkwardly and yet felt she could stay there forever. 

When he let go of the kiss and she straightened, he held out his hand. “Let me touch you.”

She moved into his reach. He ran a hand from her neck and down her shoulder. He paused above her breast until she nodded, and then he stroked her breasts the way she hadn’t been touched in years. She leaned into his touch and closed her eyes.

“You touch me so often, and I have craved to touch you in return,” he said.

This time when she kissed him, he licked into her mouth and she let him, memorizing his touch in case this never happened again. At last, she realized the risk she was taking and stepped out of his reach.

“Meta.” His voice caressed her name.

She glanced at the armrest with its dangling buckle.

“I gave you my word,” Nico said, and laid his arm back down.

She fastened the buckle, all the while conscious of his gaze on her face like a touch.

“We will change the world together, my Meta. Who else will we heal this week?”

They talked of cancers, anemia, hormone treatments and nerve damage. It thrilled her to her core and gave her delicious dreams that night. After all her years of sacrifice, work and loneliness, she deserved this.

* * *

“The JoNi cells don’t die, but they also don’t grow,” Meta reported in her daily phone call with Iselda Merrick. “I have kept cells in many conditions, and even when they shrivel and die on a bare petri dish, they revive under the right conditions. Their cells are as immortal as they are.”

“But they don’t grow?”

“No. Once they are out of his body, they don’t divide. The mitosis halts entirely.”

“Curious. Do you have a hypothesis?” Iselda asked.

Meta paused to think how to phrase it. Iselda was not a doctor. “His cells have a normal replacement rate when they are in his body. Our taste buds are replaced every ten days; we constantly shed skin cells, and grow hair and fingernails. His body does this the same way any other body does. The cells of an ordinary mortal don’t divide and grow once they are separated from the body either. HeLa cells do, but those are cancer cells. Healthy cells die within a few days when separated from a body. The JoNi cells are entirely unique in their ability to survive outside the body, but they don’t grow and divide any more than other mortal cells do,” Meta summarized. “I believe this is the key to the JoNi cells’ ability to heal diseases. If they grew like cancer, we couldn’t use them to treat diseases inside another person’s body. Instead, the cells fuse to the diseased cells and heal them without replicating.”

“We start trying to cure cancer this week,” Iselda said.

Meta smiled and nodded. She had already cured cancer, but Dietmar Otto’s cure was her idea, with the cells the Merricks had given her, and the money was funneling into her private bank account. 

Merrick Pharma was starting by curing discrete organ cancers, like liver and kidney and pancreas. Nico’s bone marrow had cured one case of leukemia. The cures were being sold to millionaires and billionaires until they could get the proper patents in place and begin billing insurance companies that had serious money.

“Have you made progress on the klotho hormone?” Iselda asked.

This is where Meta would earn her Nobel Prize. Curing cancer was a parlor trick. The work with the klotho hormone and lymphatic system would stop aging in its tracks and put her in the history books while she was still around to enjoy the fame, perhaps for centuries.

“I am able to take entire nodes and glands from him, and his body regrows them. I have a supply for research, and should be able to amend the klotho hormone trial to begin again,” Meta announced.

Iselda nodded.

“How is the research progressing with the other donors?” Meta asked. Nico would want news of his friends.

“Very well. None are so advanced as you. You can imagine how much the Chinese are clamoring for a cure for aging and all its ills.”

Meta nodded. Biogerontology was a huge field in China, with its aging population and lack of young people. That was why the Merricks had sent two of the immortal donors to China - that would be their biggest market. “Have they been able to harvest organ cells?”

“There has been a slight delay, which is why I am so pleased with your progress, Dr. Kozak. Is there anything you need? How often will you be able to harvest his organs for cancer cures?” Iselda asked.

“I don’t like to overtax him. We know they can die eventually,” Meta hedged. 

“Would he be able to regrow his liver daily? Or twice a week? Surely a kidney every day wouldn’t be too much to ask,” Iselda pressed.

“Could we show him pictures of the people he is curing? He likes that,” Meta said. Nico had a generous heart. He wouldn’t mind a daily surgery if he knew who he was helping.

Iselda’s face stilled. “Does it matter if he likes that?”

She had slipped badly and she stammered. “It’s no worse than petting the rabbits. They are easier to handle if they’re happy.”

“Don’t make a pet of him,” Iselda warned her.

“No ma’am.”

“If you want to show him pictures, Google some photos and make up any stories you want.”

“Of course, yes, I should have thought of that myself,” Meta said. She didn’t like the idea of lying to Nico, but it was for a good cause.

“I’m sending you a production schedule for his organ cells. We’ll need to maximize his capacity to meet demand without flooding the market and depressing the prices we can charge,” Iselda said.

An email chimed into Meta’s inbox and she didn’t open it. Iselda telling her to lie to Nico and harvest his organs on a schedule she had devised without even consulting her got Meta’s hackles up. She had stopped Bridger from hurting Nico, and she would protect him from Iselda as well. 

“I will evaluate your schedule against what I think his body can tolerate,” she said coolly. There, she would decide what Nico would donate, not Iselda. 

Nico was hers in a way nothing had been hers before.

* * *

“I’m going to leave in a catheter tonight,” Meta said, businesslike the way she always was when she tended to his bodily needs. “I won’t be here in the morning.”

“But you will be back tomorrow?” Nico asked.

“Yes, I am going to Germany this afternoon and will be back tomorrow night. I’m going to check on Dietmar’s recovery from kidney cancer,” Meta said.

“Ah! This will be interesting for both of us!” Nico said.

“I knew you would like that.”

She wrote in his charts. “I thought about asking my father to check in on you and get you some breakfast. I hope you don’t mind, I decided not to.”

“As long as you keep the door locked so Bridger can’t get me again.” His voice trembled.

Meta was wearing her hair loose more often these days, and a few locks brushed across her face when she touched his cheek. “I will never let Bridger hurt you again.”

“Is he still here? Please tell me.”

“He’s here, along with five others. They watch the camera feed, you know,” Meta said, nodding at the ceiling.

So in addition to the security call button, the crash cage and the knockout gas, he had to defeat a continuously monitored security camera. Did they watch the surgeries when she cut him open and took his organs? Were they watching Meta kiss him? Had they seen her unstrap his arm? Surely someone would have intervened if they’d seen the risk Meta was taking. She might be lying about security personnel watching the camera. 

“I wondered if there were more than just we two. Is this a real clinic? Are there patients?”

“Yes. We treat many patients every day. The community knows to come here. We take funding from the Church to pay for vaccines and check-ups. Soon we hope to have a dialysis machine. I spend a couple hours every afternoon in the clinic. Did I not tell you?”

“You know how I love the stories you tell me.”

Meta told him of the people who came to the clinic and, without noticing, told him everything about their operating hours and staff.

* * *

That night, Nicky couldn’t dream away the straps holding him down, but he could dream that it was Joe holding him down instead, Joe’s weight on his torso and legs, his hands pinning Nicky’s arms to the bed while he kissed down his neck.

“You are such a generous lover, Nicky, but tonight will be my gift to you. You don’t move. Let me touch you, hold you,” Joe murmured.

“I would hold you.”

Joe shushed him gently, his hands traveling all over Nicky’s body, erasing the memory of Meta’s small, cool hands wherever they touched him. It was Joe massaging his stiff joints and smoothing the hair from his forehead. It was Joe who kissed him, holding his face, low and masculine laughter replacing Meta’s voice in his ear. 

Joe slicked up a hand and began to stroke and caress and arouse.

“She touches me,” Nicky confessed. Not sexually - she hadn’t collected a sperm sample, but Nicky knew she would soon.

“It’s me now, amore mio, think only of me,” Joe crooned.

Nicky obeyed. 

“I want you tonight,” Joe whispered.

“Have me, I want you to take me. Please, Joe.”

Between the strap on his torso and the straps on his thighs, Nicky had some ability to move his hips. He arched to give Joe room to get his hand down to work him open, his body responding eagerly to Joe’s familiar touch. It was Joe’s hand pressing him to the bed and playfully refusing to let him move, not straps.

“Kiss me,” Nicky asked, unable to move a hand to guide Joe’s head to him.

Joe laid himself out over Nicky, kissing him while his hand kept working him between his thighs until Nicky was panting with want. The texture of his beard chased away the memory of Meta’s smooth lips. Joe muffled Nicky’s cry with his mouth, keeping them quiet when he penetrated him. 

“I am yours and you are mine,” Nicky said in Arabic.

“Forever.” 

Joe rocked and thrust inside Nicky, stroking him with his hand to bring them both off. At the moment of climax, Joe faded, and Nicky was alone, straining against the straps and having a wet dream. Nicky’s come spattered a few drops on his belly, the rest absorbed into the surgical drape that was all Meta allowed him to wear.

Nicky grabbed the dream back, refusing to let it go just yet.

“Shh,” Joe comforted him, stroking his hair. “I’m still here. I belong wholly to you; she doesn’t even know about us.”

That made Nicky laugh. “Of all the men who heard your magnificent speech in the van, I am the only survivor.”

“She can’t take me from you when she doesn’t know what we are to each other,” Joe said, running a finger underneath the strap over Nicky’s ribs.

“You are well? You’ve escaped, haven’t you? It would comfort me to know you are free.”

“Yes, of course. We’re coming to rescue you.”

“I will escape before you come; don’t put yourself in danger.”

Joe raised an extremely expressive eyebrow. “Don’t tell me not to do something you know I’m going to do anyway.”

Nicky turned his face and nuzzled Joe’s beard.

“How is she treating you?” Joe asked, caressing his head.

“She revels in my helplessness and fancies herself my protector, even while she hurts me a thousand times a day with her needles and scalpels and words.”

“Tell me.”

Centuries ago, they had learned that the only way to live with and process through the trauma they faced so often was to hide nothing. Nicky told Joe everything - all the indignities and pain and even his fear. Joe’s love caught and cradled them all until Nicky saw that even these would fade someday. Until then, he would let Joe bear the burden with him.

“There’s one more thing,” Nicky said. He had debated about talking this out with Joe. “I have been thinking about Booker and how he betrayed us. I am betraying Meta, and it makes me think of how Booker treated us, to keep our trust until the trap was sprung. He laughed and talked with us, the way I do with Meta. He said our work was important and he was on our team, the way I do with Meta. I have wondered if forgiving Booker meant trying to understand what he did, and I think I am coming to understand what he did.”

“You know Andy and Nile think that means understanding his grief and loneliness,” Joe pointed out.

“You can’t understand betrayal without understanding it all. Booker was grieving and lonely, this is true, but he was also calculating and deceitful,” Nicky replied. “I understand him better now. The more I understand him, the less I like him.”

“You know my opinion of him hasn’t changed in a century.”

Nicky searched Joe’s deep brown eyes. “Did I hurt you when I decided to trust him again despite what he’d done to you?”

Joe’s fingers played over Nicky’s face, tracing the high bridge of his nose. “We’ll talk about that when I’m really here, not just in a dream. And you’d better tell me everything you just told me. This doesn’t count and you know it.”

“Joe!”

But Joe was already fading, leaving Nicky naked and alone and scared.

* * *

Meta’s research with the klotho hormone was turning into a fountain of youth. She’d kept one of Nico’s kidneys intact and used it as a klotho hormone production factory, getting enough to treat an entire generation of mice before the kidney inexplicably stopped functioning. The results nearly put her over the moon with excitement. Not only did elderly mice show improved cognitive function, but when dissected, their telomeres matched that of mice half their age.

She would have to convince Iselda that Nico’s kidneys were more valuable for their hormone production than as kidney disease treatment, though perhaps there was a way to do both. Meta was lost in her research when her father interrupted her in the animal lab.

“Here you are! You’re late for your shift. What has swallowed your mind?” he asked, coming to peer over her shoulder.

“You remember my klotho hormone trial was halted several months ago? I may have figured out how to solve the problem,” Meta said. 

Her father put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her hair. “That’s my girl. Now come upstairs and look at this baby with a sore throat.”

Meta didn’t mind working in the clinic. It kept her grounded, rather than becoming arrogant like the research scientists who confined themselves to their ivory towers. Besides, the townspeople were so grateful when it took her no effort at all to give a baby antibiotics and tell a diabetic to test his blood sugar. 

“Has Bridger given you and your guest any more trouble?” he asked as they walked up the stairs to the clinic’s ground level.

“No, I keep the door locked.”

Her father smiled at her, crinkling up his eyes into wrinkles. “You wear your hair loose more often. It suits you. Lipstick too, I think. I noticed your guest was a handsome man the one time I saw him. Anything a father should know about?”

Meta couldn’t keep from smiling and self-consciously tucking her hair behind her ear. “We work so well together. I wasn’t expecting that, honestly, I thought he’d be sulky and angry. Instead, it’s like having a partner, a real partner in my work.”

“I felt like that when I met your mother,” her father said, giving her an appraising look. 

They exited the elevator into the clinic. The humidity of the summer air gathered around her, chasing off the cool, dry air conditioning of the lower levels. She hurried to the exam room where she could hear a baby crying to avoid more comments from her father. Meta had no desire to get married. She’d seen her mother sideline her own career to take care of her family and handle the details that her father considered beneath him. Long ago, she’d made the conscious decision to never be in that situation.

But with Nico, things would be different. Not that they would marry, but the closer they grew, the more she thought that some sort of relationship might be possible for them. He was quite handsome, not to mention intelligent and pleasant to talk to. She liked him more and more. It pleased her to see his happiness when she brought him a new CD or treats to eat. That was love, wasn’t it? Wanting to make someone happy? She hadn’t been in love since her twenties.

In the exam room, the mother handed Meta the baby. As Meta turned to place the baby on the exam table, he unexpectedly clung to Meta, laying his head on her shoulder and cooing. 

“You have a way with babies!” the mother exclaimed.

No one had ever said anything like that to Meta before. She found that she liked the thought. She wasn’t the motherly sort, but if she had a child and someone to take care of it, a family that advanced her career rather than holding it back, that opened up all sorts of possibilities. 

She peered into the baby’s ears and throat, considering their situation and the future before them. Nico was already entirely hers; their baby would be company for him, and a guarantee of his eternal cooperation.

Yes, it was a very good idea.

* * *

More often lately, Meta would stop by to see him again in the evenings on her way to bed. Nicky had learned that Meta lived on the lowest level of the clinic, the one fitted out as a hotel room with the magnificent picture window. She didn’t enjoy cooking; she read medical journals for relaxation; she had Netflix but rarely watched it; she didn’t like traveling. 

Once she had decided he was interested in her, she talked quite a lot, most of it about medicine and research with an occasional drop of personal information and an even more occasional mention of something Nicky could actually use. He still didn’t know where she kept the security call button, or if the cage walls and knockout gas were on a motion detector or had to be triggered by someone. But he knew where the oxygen canisters were, and that the oven on the lowest level used propane. He remained suspicious of how often the security camera was turned on and monitored.

When Nicky heard the key in the lock, he schooled his features into a welcoming smile and turned towards the door. She locked it behind her, as she always did, slipped the key into her pocket, as she always did, turned on the main lighting, as she always did, and tapped on a tablet. Sometimes she would announce a message, sometimes not. He wondered if she controlled the security camera from the tablet.

“Hello, Nico,” Meta said, turning off the CD player. Nicky had been listening to the same CD for three days now. 

She crossed the small room eagerly, unstrapping his arm and bending down to kiss him. He filled his hand with her hair and kissed her back. She pulled the stool over to sit down next to him, taking his hand and placing it against her cheek. 

“Tell me what has made you happy,” Nicky said.

“You know me well enough to read my moods.”

“I have lived almost a thousand years. I can read moods, Meta.” He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand. “I have learned much in the last thousand years.” He turned her hand and pressed the next kiss to the inside of her wrist, flicking his tongue lightly against her skin. Her hand clenched his arm. “You have no idea how much I’ve learned, the things I could show you.”

She laughed, low and delighted. “You’re in the same mood I’m in tonight.”

“I’m in this mood more often than you know.”

“You flirt!” she laughed out loud.

He laughed with her, turning the clench of hatred into amusement at her stupidity. How could an intelligent woman possibly believe he would fall in love with her after everything she’d done to him? Earlier today, she’d opened his abdomen and taken his intestines, then kissed him on the forehead when he revived and complimented him on his recovery.

Years ago, the team had settled into a town in Albania and made friends with the neighbors. In learning the gossip of the town, they heard about Besjana and her father. Everyone knew that Besjana was her father’s favorite - the golden child whose father responded to her every wish and dream. One day Besjana crushed her father’s skull with an iron lampbase and told the town he’d been molesting her daily for most of her life. When Besjana stood trial for murder, Nicky attended. He’d never been able to forget the way she wept and wailed about the torture of being her father’s favorite child and pretending to like his indulgences; she feared for her sister if she rejected him. The team broke Besjana out of jail and settled her in Latvia with a new identity before moving on.

Nicky wondered if it was the vestige of a conscience. Besjana’s father must have known he was doing something wrong, or he wouldn’t have tried to make it up to his daughter in other ways. Meta must know she was torturing him, or she wouldn’t be so intent on comforting him.

Or perhaps it was not a conscience. Perhaps it was self-delusion. Meta could persuade herself that she was as kind as she could be, and Nicky was willingly participating, in the same way Besjana’s father probably believed his daughter liked his attentions. Meta was deluding herself; if she had any vestige of a conscience, she would know Nicky’s affection was a lie. 

Stupid, stupid woman. He’d never felt such contempt for anyone. He hated her small kindnesses as much as the larger cruelties.

Meta rested a hand on his chest while he ran his fingers through her hair. “Tell me something. Have you ever fathered a child?”

“I don’t believe so. Certainly not on purpose.” Was she testing him? He suspected no one had told Meta that he and Joe were lovers, but he couldn’t be sure. If Booker had described the team to Merrick, he would have mentioned that. Or would he? If Nicky let Meta assume he was straight or bisexual, would she know he was lying? He dodged the question. “I would not have wanted to create a child who I then had to watch die. Do you have children?”

“No, I’ve never wanted them before. I’ve never met anyone whose child I wanted before.” She dragged out the word ‘before’ with a purr in her voice.

Nicky didn’t have to ask ‘before’ what. “You’ve studied me enough. Is this inability to stay dead in my DNA? Could I pass it on to a child?”

Meta pressed a kiss to the palm of his hand. “Do you want to find out?”

“Kiss me while I think about it.”

Meta kissed his mouth, his smooth cheeks she had shaved, ran her fingers through his hair that she had washed earlier that day, kissed down his neck and played with his nipples. He exhaled a long moan and then caught her hand to stop the caresses.

“I want to be old-fashioned about this. You’ll forgive me a quirk due to my age.”

“Old-fashioned how?”

“When I fill you with my child, I want you to enjoy it, not make it a medical procedure.”

“Nico,” Meta whispered.

Nicky strained against all the straps holding him down. “I want you. Shall I tell you?”

Meta nodded.

“We would have dinner first. You don’t like to cook, but I love it. I’m nearly as good at cooking as I am in bed. We would have caprese salad, then pancetta with zucchini. It will melt in your mouth and almost make you forget what will come after we have eaten. Almost.”

She laid her head on his chest as he seduced her between kisses and caresses. 

“Perhaps you would be disappointed with me. I am not very experienced,” she confessed partway through his description of how he would make love to her.

“Beautiful Meta, it would be my honor to devote myself entirely to your pleasure. Perhaps it will take us more than one time to make our baby. I would like that. Would you?”

“I would like that very much,” Meta whispered. She kissed the palm of his hand one last time, then guided his arm back to the armrest and strapped him down. “It’s just a fairy tale, though. We wouldn’t actually,” she paused.

“Don’t tell me not to hope for it,” Nicky whispered back. “I’ll disobey you on this one thing.”

She stroked his hair and smiled. “Alright, we’ll have our fantasy and you can talk to me about it again. The dinner isn’t fully planned yet. You cook, but you must let me bring the dessert and the wine.”

“A Tuscan Chianti, at least a hundred years old. This is a special occasion.”

“Done! And for dessert?” 

“For an occasion like this? We must have baklava.”

* * *

Dr. Kozak was getting above herself.

“We need his heart, so you may as well take his lungs in the same procedure,” Iselda said again. The JoNi cells were remarkable for their ability to heal an organ. So far, they’d cured all sorts of kidney diseases, liver diseases, several corneal abnormalities, celiac disease and leukemia. “We’ll want his pancreas next.” Once the Merricks could reliably cure diabetes, they could stop dicking around with small potatoes like money and start talking about real power. Merrick Pharmaceuticals would replace the Gates Foundation as the biggest non-governmental player in the worldwide health industry.

“I worry about his stamina. They can die, you know,” Dr. Kozak reminded her.

Simpering little sycophant; had she always been so arrogant?

“Are the other donors producing as much as Nico?” Dr. Kozak asked.

Iselda expected the question and didn’t even have to hesitate. “Of course they are. But only two donors for all China leaves Nicky to supply all the demand in Europe. We can’t even branch out to the United States yet. I want you to start harvesting organs to the limits his body will allow.”

Dr. Kozak reached for something that was outside the camera frame and read it.

Iselda drummed her fingers on her desk. The problem was that Dr. Kozak had too much autonomy. She also knew they didn’t want to bring in another doctor and expand the number of people who knew about the donors. 

Dr. Kozak held up a paper. “I’ve been charting the amount of time it takes his body to fully heal after a donation. It’s slowed down by almost two seconds over the past two weeks. I want to give him 48 hours without a procedure. Then I’ll see about taking a sample of heart tissue.”

The gauntlet had been thrown. If Iselda was to retain her authority, she couldn’t allow this to continue. She also couldn’t allow Dr. Kozak to find out that Nicky was the only donor the Merricks had because then she would become even more self-important than she already was. Iselda knew all about Dietmar Otto and the money he was paying Dr. Kozak. She was going to become a liability if she kept on like this.

“This may be a good time for an onsite visit. I’ve met the other donors. I would like to meet this one and see your facility. We have enough funding for an upgrade if there’s equipment you would like. Why don’t you prepare a list and we can go over it after I meet Nicky,” Iselda said casually. “I’d like to rotate the attending doctors through all the donors. Perhaps we can discuss your transfer to China while I’m there.”

Dr. Kozak’s eyelids flickered, but she kept her composure. “I would welcome your visit. I’m not sure transferring me away from Nico would be productive, given our working relationship, but we can discuss it.”

“Excellent. I’ll have my assistant make the arrangements,” Iselda said before she ended the call.

Iselda was still fuming about the fact that they couldn’t replace Dr. Kozak when Bridger called. “Have you found them?” she asked.

“We’ve got a lead. A police station near Constanta booked in a couple of refugees without passports that match the descriptions of Joe and the new one, Nile Freeman.”

“And you’re calling me instead of heading down there right now because . . .?”

Bridger hesitated and his eyes shifted away. “They already escaped. We didn’t see the report until yesterday. But at least we know they’re still in Romania. We would have found them in time to go get them, but we’re still short-staffed. The chopper crash made the news; everyone in private security knows who owned it. The Merricks have been basically blacklisted by every private security contractor in Europe.”

“Then hire from Africa! Or China! Do I have to remind you that Europe isn’t alone on the map?”

“I’m working on it, ma’am. The visas aren’t coming through fast.”

“I want a full security contingent at Blessed Mary Medical Clinic. They’ll head back there to rescue their teammate. You be ready for them,” Iselda said.

“Ma’am, perhaps we should move the asset so they can’t rescue him.”

“Yes, that worked out so well with Joe and Nile,” Iselda said drily. “We keep this one where he is and capture the rest when they arrive.”

“Yes ma’am,” Bridger said.

Iselda ended the call.

* * *

Damn that rich bitch and her fucking demands that he magic up security personnel when Merrick Pharmaceuticals was basically feeding them through a wood chipper. He couldn’t prep a team when he couldn’t tell them they were going up against demons who couldn’t die. Fuck, even without the gag order, no one would believe him anyway, not without a demonstration.

Bridger took a few minutes to imagine the fun of taking his security team down to the third level and emptying his gun into that fucking Italian and watching him come back to life so he could die all over again. They could take turns killing him. He deserved it after all the people he’d murdered the first time they captured him. Damn that other bitch and her key. He could get the information about the safehouse out of that Italian fucker if his boss wasn’t so freaked out about Nicky finding out that his friends had escaped.

He threw down the tablet and went to check on the clinic. Security was the most boring job in the world, right up until it wasn’t. But this sleepy little clinic in the middle of nowhere was the most boring gig he’d ever had, with the added annoyance of sick kids.

Outside the office, he nearly ran into Dr. Kozak. She looked like her conversation with Iselda Merrick went about as well as his had.

“Do you know when the Merricks are coming?” she asked him.

“I haven’t heard a thing,” he said sourly. She outranked him, so outright disrespect was a bad idea, despite the job security. Anyone who knew the secret couldn’t really be fired. Besides, Dr. Kozak knew his secret - about being defeated in the fight on the bridge and then telling the immortals where to find Steven Merrick. If she ever spilled about that, he wasn’t sure he’d have time to kill her before the Merricks took him out.

“Are they going to transfer you to China as well?”

Bridger almost asked why, then remembered that Dr. Kozak didn’t know about the helicopter crash. “No one has said anything about that.” 

Were they going to ship Dr. Kozak away? Was that a euphemism for getting rid of her? Bridger was willing to help with that. Watching her pursed lips and tense shoulders, he processed something he hadn’t paid attention to before. Dr. Kozak was wearing her hair down and curled. Didn’t she usually have it pulled back? She’d freaked out when he killed their Italian lab rat. He’d thought that was a turf war about an asset, but maybe it was something more to her.

“You can continue your research with any of them, so a transfer shouldn’t matter,” he said, testing his idea.

“It will matter very much!”

“You’re wearing your hair different these days,” Bridger went on.

Dr. Kozak wound it up into a bun and stuck a pen through it to hold it in place. It mystified him how women did that.

“Something you don’t want the Merricks to know about you and the lab rat? Is he living up to that romantic Italian reputation?”

“I’ll remind you that I know a few things that you don’t want made public,” she said tightly.

“Looks like we’ve both got secrets for the other one to keep, don’t we?” he said with a smirk. 

She stalked off, stiff with anger. He ought to tell someone what she was up to before she did something stupid. His mind churned with worst-case scenarios. He wouldn’t put it past that Italian lab rat to be playing some kind of con on Dr. Kozak, like he thought he could sweet-talk her into letting him go. Would he just make a run for it? Or kill them all on his way out like they wiped out everyone in the London building? He needed to report Dr. Kozak and get her fired, or better yet, disposed of permanently. 

Damn, fuck, shit. If he reported her, she could tell everyone what she knew about him. He really did have to keep her sick little secret, despite the security risk.

He’d just have to keep a closer eye on her and her lab rat.

* * *

“We’re visiting the clinic in Romania,” Iselda told her husband.

Carl looked up from the lab report he was reading. “Is this about getting more tissue?”

“It’s about reminding Dr. Kozak who pays her salary!”

Carl’s lab report was for one of their conventional cancer treatments. It wasn’t a miracle cure, but it was reliable and understandable. Miracles made him nervous. “We’re already moving faster than we’d ever hoped.”

“No, we should have three of them right now, not just one!”

“This wasn’t how we got the SeLe cell line,” Carl said, thumbing through the lab report because he hated making eye contact when Iselda was upset.

“What did you say?”

“The SeLe cell line came from the one immortal who gave it to us. We didn’t kidnap anyone. We didn’t strap anyone down and keep them prisoner,” Carl said to the lab report.

“Carl, these people killed Steven! They nearly decapitated him and then they threw him through the penthouse window! Have you forgotten that? Because I haven’t!”

Carl didn’t have a reply to that, because even if Steven started it all, he was still his son and Carl would never say he’d brought it on himself. “First, do no harm. I took an oath, Iselda.”

“So did Dr. Kozak! But it doesn’t apply to the people who killed Steven!”

Well, yes, there was that. He sighed.

* * *

Nicky was the one who did things slowly and methodically, so when Joe broke down, it happened all at once. One moment he and Nile were running through the trees after having escaped from the police station, and the next moment Joe’s legs wouldn’t work properly and it was hard to breathe and getting harder, as if he were being wound into a spiderweb, something malevolent holding him helpless and inexorably moving in for the kill.

“Joe!” Nile hissed, keeping her voice down. They were still close enough to the road to hear cars.

Joe was on his hands and knees, trying to remember how his lungs worked. Nile needed him to stand up and run. He got one foot in the right position and then Nile was yanking on his arm, pulling him to his feet. Joe got up and ran, focusing on keeping Nile’s dingy orange jail jumpsuit in sight. If he didn’t think about anything but following the jumpsuit, the pressure on his chest stopped increasing.

He didn’t have any sense of time or distance anymore. He ran until Nile stopped running and then he stopped too, bent over with his hands on his knees. There was something very important that his brain wasn’t telling him, and his thoughts were getting sticky and slow, like working their way into the center of a spiderweb. 

“Joe? I need you to sit down. Right here. Do you see where I’m pointing? Sit down.” Nile’s voice was soft and measured, so calm that Joe’s mind latched onto it like a drowning man to driftwood.

Joe put his butt on the ground where Nile pointed. The trees were thick here. He looked up, where the deepening twilight wove into the leaves, like nets, like webs, like traps. He was caught and couldn’t get free.

“Joe? Stay with me. We’re going to breathe together. In two three; out two three. Watch me. Just watch me.”

He knew how to breathe, it was just hard right now. Watching Nile helped. He reached out a hand and she took it in both of her hands and pressed it to her ribs just below her breasts. “Can you feel me breathing? Match me. I’m going to sit next to you.”

Nile seated herself next to Joe and then leaned back against a tree and pulled Joe’s head down to her chest. “Feel me breathing. You’re doing great, Joe. Let’s just breathe together.”

The tight feeling on his chest started to ease. He clung to Nile and she stroked his hair, then worked her fingers up into his hair above his ears and rubbed his scalp in tiny circles. It relaxed him. He didn’t know how long they sat like that, but after his breathing slowed, he got very sleepy and tears started leaking out of his eyes even though he didn’t think he was really crying.

“I might be okay now. I don’t know what happened,” he said at last.

“I think you had a panic attack,” Nile said. 

This century had so many words for feelings. 

“Panic attacked me?” Joe asked, aiming for humor.

“It sure wasn’t a sneak attack,” Nile said. “I’m surprised you lasted this long.”

Joe didn’t know what to say to that.

“That wasn’t criticism, Joe. You’re the strongest person I know, but you’ve been torn in half.”

That was the thought at the center of the spiderweb. Joe fought back against the sensation of being crushed, erupting into words to name it and define it and somehow make it something he could fight instead of run from. “What if he’s gone for good? I saw this happen to Quynh - we were so sure we would find her. We looked for decades before Andy called it off and it was years before we saw anything but pain on her face. You don’t heal from that, Nile, you don’t. You learn to keep breathing, but Andy never got over it. I’m scared for Nicky, but I’m scared for me too. He’s all and he’s more than all; he’s my warmth and my light and my heart. What if Nicky’s gone and I can’t even die? I’m not as strong as Andy.”

“Joe.”

“I can’t go on without him.” Joe closed his eyes, drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them.

He felt Nile’s hand on his shoulder. “Okay.”

Joe looked at her, puzzled. “Okay?”

“Not like, okay Nicky is gone, but okay I’m not going to give you a pep talk. You let me cry it out that day in the truck, the day I should have been home with my family. I owe you one. Feel however you want. I’m here with you through it, and I’ll be here afterwards too. Just FYI, I haven’t given up on finding Nicky.”

That all-encompassing spiderweb suddenly seemed less sticky, and some of his thoughts worked their way free. The spider retreated. Not that the fear lessened, but the urgency did. He could hold the fear off for a while. 

After several silent minutes, he said, “I guess we ought to check the clinic in Borsa first, right? And even if Nicky isn’t there, we can find someone who might know. Or we’ll take their computers.”

“Yeah, Copley and me together can find a needle in a haystack. I mean, he found 150 years worth of you guys. He’s kind of a specialist anymore, finding immortals.”

This was different from losing Quynh; Quynh got dropped into a trackless ocean by people who wanted to make her disappear. Nicky was being held prisoner by people who intended to make use of him, make money off of him. That would leave a trail.

Nile went on. “I’ve been watching Copley work for weeks. You know what he’ll do? He’ll start flagging odd stuff, like people getting cured from incurable diseases, or someone making a breakthrough in klotho hormone research or telomere extension. Then we start tracing the money. You better believe we’re already watching Merrick Pharma expenditures like a hawk. They won’t be able to hire new people or buy new equipment without us finding out. Copley already figured out that Merrick Pharma can’t hire enough security anymore. They’ve had help wanted ads out ever since we wiped them out in London. You don’t keep advertising if the position is filled, you know?”

“I’m getting ahead of myself, worrying that we’ll never find Nicky.”

“You said it, not me,” Nile said with a grin.

Twilight had deepened into night. The reflection of Nile’s certainty was enough moonlight to keep Joe from getting completely lost in the darkness.


	10. Chapter 10

The moment when Nile and Joe walked through the door of the safehouse, ragged and hungry, was better than coming back to life. Andy smothered both of them in a hug, her face wet with tears. 

“Copley found your arrest records! We were so worried!” she exclaimed.

“We only stayed in jail as long as we did because of the food,” Joe said. “Breaking out was easy.”

“Oh, it was because of the food? You must have been starving if you wanted jail food! I wondered why Nicky took his own sweet time breaking you out. Copley, what have we got to feed everyone? Where’s Nicky?” Andy said over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen.

“Nicky wasn’t on the helicopter with us,” Joe said, following her.

Andy dropped the apples she’d picked up and they rolled away across the floor.

An hour later, the discussion about what to do about Nicky wasn’t getting anywhere.

Joe wouldn’t let go of the idea that Nicky was still at Blessed Mary Medical Clinic in Borsa. “They would have kept him there as bait for the rest of us,” Joe insisted. 

“They wouldn’t have known you would escape,” Andy pointed out. “Besides, it’s obvious that’s the first place we would look. They would have moved him as soon as you escaped. Let Copley look for him.”

“Joe, I assumed the three of you were together. I haven’t even been looking for Nicky. Just give me a few days,” Copley said.

“A few days!” Joe exclaimed. He leapt up from the broken crate he’d been sitting on so he could pace.

“Buy me some drones and a laptop. I’ll stake out the clinic for a few days while Copley searches. We’re doing serious recon before we storm the place this time. None of this hurry and thinking it’s an easy target. That’s what got us caught last time,” Nile said.

“Drones! Right! We watch the clinic for a few days; Copley searches for a few days. Then we move,” Joe said, seizing on the idea as a compromise.

“It could work,” Copley allowed.

* * *

Five days later, Copley and Nile both agreed that Nicky was likely at Blessed Mary Medical Clinic. Nile’s drones had spotted Dr. Kozak at the clinic, and Copley found proof that Merrick Pharma was trying to hire private security forces for a location in Romania.

Joe spent the time acquiring a truly thrilling number of firearms, disappearing for hours and then coming back with weapons to add to the cache.

Andy hung over Copley’s shoulder watching him work so often that he threatened to buy her her own computer. 

“I know how to use a computer,” Andy said, offended at his suggestion that he would have to teach her.

“You know how to interface with a computer,” Copley corrected her in that precise and didactic tone that always made Andy roll her eyes. “Actually using a computer takes programming experience and specialized training.”

“Yep,” Andy agreed, propping her chin on the fist she’d set on his shoulder, “that’s what we hired you for.”

“I was hired?” Copley asked drily.

“Pay yourself a salary,” Andy said with a shrug. “Don’t steal though, we hold grudges and we’ll come after you.”

Copley turned to raise an eyebrow at her. Since her chin was still on his shoulder, it put them very close indeed. Andy didn’t pull away. 

Copley was . . . different from Booker. All three of them had suffered crippling losses, but talking about loss with Copley was more healing than it had ever been with Booker. Booker’s focus was on his grief, loneliness and self-hatred. He didn’t talk about his sons so much as talk about how he would never get over losing his sons. Copley’s grief was profound, but when he talked about his grief, he ended up talking about Raya and how much he loved her. It gave Andy room to remember the good times with Quynh. 

She wasn’t blind to the warm emotional connection growing between them, but she didn’t know if she wanted it to turn into anything yet. Shared grief wasn’t much of a foundation for a relationship. In fact, it could warp a relationship all the way to betrayal. The fact that Booker thought her grief meant she would want to submit any of them, including herself, to medical experiments chilled her to the bone. How had he misjudged her so badly? How had she misjudged him so badly?

Copley tipped his head just enough to brush his cheek against hers. She stayed there for a moment, her hair falling into his face.

“Booker and I weren’t . . . involved,” she said at last, pulling away.

“I know. He told me everything about you, every word you ever said,” Copley replied.

Andy folded her arms and looked down. She hated the thought of Booker repeating all her pain and vulnerability to Copley.

“I’m sorry he violated your trust. You’ve all been so focused on how Booker affected Joe and Nicky that no one has really talked about what he did to you. What we did to you. I helped him and I don’t believe I’ve ever properly apologized for that. I am sorry. From the depths of my heart and soul, I will forever be sorry for what I did to you.”

“Forever is a long time,” Andy said.

“For as long as we have left,” Copley amended.

Andy gave him half a smile. “Apology accepted. Don’t wallow in self-hatred about it.”

“Yes boss.”

“What are you looking at?” Andy asked, nodding at his computer screen.

“Personnel records for Blessed Mary Medical Clinic. See these six men listed as janitorial staff? They’ve all been here since the tissue specimen box arrived at the post office in Kyiv.”

“Only six?”

“Merrick Pharma is trying to hire security contractors using two different shell companies, but you people have scared off the private security industry from working for Merrick, pretty much entirely,” Copley said.

Andy gave a self-satisfied snort.

“Yes, that’s what I thought you’d say.” 

Andy gave his shoulder a playful shove.

Copley pointed at a name on the list. “See this one? That’s Ian Bridger, one of the only survivors from the London breakout.”

“Pull up his photo,” Andy directed, then she looked closely at it. “That’s the guy I beat the shit out of on the bridge.”

“Elaborate, please,” Copley asked.

“I got sick of shit, so I took an axe. He got in my way. I took issue with that. Then he got out of my way,” Andy said with a shrug. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” 

Copley was looking at the labrys handle that extended above her head. “Would you do me a favor? Don’t try to defeat a man with a gun by using an axe?”

“I do it all the time!” Andy protested.

Copley sighed in defeat entirely too much, Andy decided.

* * *

Joe knew Nicky was at the clinic because he couldn’t bear it if he wasn’t. There was simply a wall in his mind that refused to process any other scenario. Copley and Nile needed proof. Fine, he could spend a few days prepping, because they were not going to fuck this up. Nile showed him how to direct a drone and he spent hours checking out the topography, especially the steep drop behind the clinic. The entire hillside had been excavated to build the six layers below ground and then mostly hidden again. 

A concrete cantilevered overhang concealed the plexiglass view window on the lowest level unless you knew exactly what you were looking for and flew the drone in close. Clever construction work. The rest of the steep incline had grown over with shrubs and grasses over the decades since it had been excavated. Joe spent a day going over the abandoned heavy construction equipment that they’d stumbled across on their first visit to Blessed Mary Medical Clinic, searching for VIN numbers and logos. He wasn’t surprised to find that the trucks dated back to the late 1940s. Merrick Pharmaceuticals must have moved their illegal medical research here after World War II, and sent their legal activities to London. 

Most of the people entering and leaving the clinic looked like locals in search of medical care. Three times a day, security personnel walked the grounds. Nile identified them by the concealed holsters that really weren’t that concealed. An older male doctor frequently walked out of the clinic with patients. They saw Dr. Meta Kozak just once. She came out to meet a delivery truck.

“There are people living there we never see,” Nile pointed out. “You can tell by the amount of food they bring in.”

“Those living quarters on the lowest level,” Joe commented.

“What else? I didn’t see anything before they knocked me out.”

“Operating rooms, laboratories, the third level where they’ve probably got Nicky locked up, a lab full of animals, a level full of filing cabinets. Lowest level has a couple of apartments,” Joe said.

“See that guy? Does he look familiar to you?” Nile asked, hovering the drone.

A big white man carrying several weapons had emerged from the clinic and swept the grounds in the pattern the security personnel here always followed. They shouldn’t be that predictable, but it did make their job easier.

“Is he that guy that told us where to find Merrick?” Joe suggested.

“That’s where I’ve seen him before! I didn’t recognize him when he wasn’t flat on his back and bleeding out of his mouth.” 

“Nicky is definitely here,” Joe said, almost to himself.

“We’ll have him back safe before sunset,” Nile said with a huge grin.

“Do you really think so?” Joe was certain because he had to be, but if Nile thought so too, that meant something.

Nile squeezed his shoulder, then pulled him into a sideways hug. “Yeah, I think so.”

Andy slipped into join them so quietly that Joe didn’t hear her until she was hugging him from the other side. “Nile, once you can verify the patients are out, we move in.”

Nile nodded. “Just one kid left. He and his dad went in about an hour ago. I’ll get a drone to the exam room window and let you know when they leave.”

“Tonight? We’re getting Nicky out tonight?” Joe asked, even though Andy had just said it.

Andy pulled him into a hug and kissed his cheek.

Joe’s delighted grin got a little bit sheepish because both women were beaming at him. Then he went to find a way to attach another weapon to his tactical vest.

* * *

Dr. Kozak was compromising mission security. Bridger got suspicious when she started curling her hair. The lipstick confirmed his suspicions. They had the conversation last week where she basically admitted to what she was doing. But holy shit, an evening dress under a lab coat?

“Dr. Kozak.” That’s all he said. He wasn’t smooth and diplomatic with words, and he knew better than to outright accuse her of what he knew she was doing. Thanks to that Italian lab rat’s big mouth, Dr. Kozak was the only one who knew his role in Stephen Merrick’s death. Merrick would have died anyway, but he doubted his parents would appreciate that argument. It would cost him his job, and possibly his life, if he antagonized her.

“Is there something you wanted?” she asked coolly, pressing the button for the third floor.

Due to bad timing, they’d caught the elevator at the same time. The sixth floor was living quarters for the clinic’s permanent residents - himself, Dr. Kozak, Dr. Victor Kozak, and the rest of the security team. The two doctors had their own kitchen and living area, which included that damn view window. That was an arrogant bit of architecture.

“Just wondering if we’re providing event security for you tonight.”

“I think we both have secrets we want the other one to keep,” she replied.

The elevator opened on the third floor and the doctor walked out.

Bitch. She’d better be keeping things to a strip tease. If she unstrapped that lethal bastard, he’d kill all of them. 

Bridger made it to the security station in time to see Dr. Kozak switch off the security camera. Damn. She switched it off whenever she was in the lab with the donor, to avoid recording a donation procedure that might run afoul of medical ethics and embarrass Merrick Pharma if the recording leaked to the press. He was pretty sure tonight’s donation would also violate medical ethics, but for entirely different reasons. 

“You two, set up at the top of the elevator and stairwell. Shoot anything that comes through. You,” he said, pointing at the third member of the team, “you watch the stairwell camera. The rest of you come with me for a grounds sweep.” The last escape had been engineered by an outsider coming in for the rescue. For all he knew, the entire team plus three new immortals were already outside and set up.

* * *

Nicky wanted a window. He didn’t have a calendar, but he thought he’d been here five or six weeks. It would be late summer by now. He wanted to see blue sky and smell fresh air and hear wind rustling through the trees. Meta might bring him a CD of nature sounds if he asked, but he hated to ask her for anything that actually meant something to him. 

About a week ago, Meta got even more possessive about him. She dropped hints that she might be sent to work with another donor. She called them ‘donors’ which set Nicky’s teeth on edge. 

Every evening, she kissed him passionately, which got boring. She still would only let one arm free. And while he knew he could strangle her in the middle of the kiss, he didn’t think he could kill her fast enough to keep her from pressing the call button and triggering the cage and knockout gas. A good sniper didn’t take the shot before it was perfect.

When he heard the key in the door, he took a deep breath and focused on his goal.

She came in, locked the door behind her and then leaned on it. Her shoes were different this evening. Then she shrugged out of the white lab coat and Nicky’s eyes widened. Meta wore a form-fitting deep blue sheath dress with a plunging neckline.

“Well,” he said, filling his voice with lust. “Turn around. Let me look.”

Meta pivoted.

“Again, more slowly.”

Meta turned again.

“Very nice,” Nicky said. She might have the call button down her bra, but there were no pockets on that dress and nothing loose enough to hide anything.

“I thought you might like it.”

“Am I to do more than look at you tonight?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

She came closer, heels tapping on the linoleum, and stood over him. “They’re threatening to take us from each other, Nico. We might not have much time left together.”

Yes, that was alarming. If they took Meta away after all the time he’d spent setting up an escape, he was going to be well and truly pissed off.

“What will I do if I can’t see you again, Meta? I’m afraid of another doctor. You’re the only one I trust to protect me from Bridger. We must stay together!”

“Shh, Nico, I’ll work hard to keep us together,” she crooned, stroking his hair. “Trust me.”

Oddly, he did trust her for that. Meta would do anything she could to keep them together. He knew her. He knew what he could and could not trust about her. But she didn’t know him at all; she knew only the facade he presented to her. 

The day Nicky lost the bet to Booker about the baklava, Booker knew they were heading into a kill box, that they would be recorded, that their secret would be exposed and gone. Yet he joked and laughed with them as if nothing was wrong. He knew only Booker’s performance as a loyal team member, which meant that he didn’t know Booker at all, any more than Meta knew him. If they ever did try to reconcile with Booker, it would mean getting to know who he was beyond the performance. 

Nicky smiled at Meta, saw her blush and touch her face. He turned to kiss her fingers, knowing what that would mean to her. And the entire time, the contempt in his mind never reached his face. Not once did he mean what he said. Not once did he feel guilty for deceiving her. She deserved this. She deserved his contempt and betrayal. Her hopes and dreams, her very life, did not matter to him as much as what he wanted.

He knew exactly how Booker felt. 

“Nico, I want you tonight,” Meta murmured.

“Yes, but not here. I want you in a bed.” There wouldn’t be a cage and knockout gas on the sixth level.

“Promise me. If you promise me, I’ll trust you. Promise you’ll come back to the lab.” She kept smoothing his hair back, her face close to his. Her perfume clung to his nostrils.

“I want you and I want our child. You can trust me, Meta,” Nicky said. “I promise.”

She ripped open one velcro strap, looking at him cautiously.

“I will lie here until you give me permission to get up. You can change your mind at any time,” Nicky said. He flexed his hand where she’d unstrapped his arm but left it lying on the armrest. He didn’t move as she unstrapped his legs, his torso, his other arm. It had been more than a month since he’d even been allowed to stand up, but he forced himself to lie still.

The final strap she ripped open was the one over his neck. 

He laid there, motionless and free, and then grinned at her playfully. “May I have pants?”

She laughed and the tension broke. “I thought of that a few days ago. I brought you uniform pants from the security guards.” She handed him folded black pants from a cupboard.

“Turn around. I am shy,” Nicky said with a smile. Was she really giving him pants with pockets? She was almost volunteering to be killed.

“You’re silly. I’ve seen everything,” Meta said, but she turned around.

Nicky stood up, stretched because he couldn’t help it, and then put on the pants, looking around the room to find the surgical instruments. “Will you dance with me?” 

She’d left the CD player on. Nicky held out his hands and she came willingly into his arms. Nicky put a firm hand on her waist and walked her through a few dance steps, aiming for the counter on the other side of the room.

There was a crash of metal instruments as he stumbled. “How clumsy of me. I must be stiffer than I thought,” Nicky said apologetically, putting out his hand to catch himself.

She shooed him away and turned to pick up the tray he had spilled.

He slipped the scalpel into his pocket.

* * *

Copley had his modem attached to a portable battery pack, set up inside a copse of trees about 50 meters from the clinic. Both the trucks were about 10 meters to the west, not disguised as well as he would have liked, but they might have to leave in a hurry. With the team set to infiltrate tonight, most of Copley’s job was already done. He’d never been a field agent, though he’d had weapons training. 

So when Nile buzzed him through the earpiece and told him there were three guys sweeping the grounds in a new pattern, Copley had to scramble to find his gun.

“Did someone tip them off? Where’s Joe?”

“Joe’s here with me. I don’t know what tipped them off, but this is the first time I’ve seen three of them at once, and this is not their typical sweep pattern,” Nile said. “You’ve got one headed your way. Bug out.”

Copley couldn’t carry everything and move fast. He stashed the modem, battery and laptop under a bush and kicked leaves over it. He could wipe the hard drive remotely, which he would do as soon as he was back at the trucks. Once his pistol was loaded, he put the safety on and holstered it.

“Andy! What the fuck!” Nile hissed through the earpiece.

Andy was transmitting, but probably not on purpose. Mostly they were getting a stream of muttered invectives interspersed with occasional grunts of exertion.

Fuck. He’d bet good money that Andy was taking an axe to a gunfight. 

“Joe! Cover Andy!” Nile ordered.

“I’m heading in too,” Copley said.

“That’s a no, Copley. Bug out. That’s an order!”

“Listen to the woman, Copley,” Andy’s voice came through the earpiece. He could almost see her wiping the blood off her lip.

That was when someone slammed him to the ground, handcuffed his hands behind his back and pressed the barrel of a gun to his temple and a knee to the center of his back.

“They can’t die. But you can.”

Copley struggled to get his face out of the leaves. If his captor wanted him dead, he’d already be dead, so he figured he was worth more alive, for whatever reason.

“A lot of men died because of your doublecross. I figure it’s time you paid for that.”

Copley turned his head and identified his captor. “Ian Bridger.”

“Pleasure to meet you too. Shall we go find out what the life of a traitor is worth to your new team?” Bridger hauled him to his feet.

* * *

Yeah, Andy was boss, but right now, Nile was the one with all the information and Andy was amusing herself. It was possible she’d just deflected a bullet with her labrys, kind of like a lightsaber, and they’d never really had the talk about what kind of religion Andy believed in so it was possible she was a Jedi. This would be easier if she had eyes on Andy instead of just listening through the earpiece.

So, boss Nile.

“The kid and his dad just exited the clinic. Once the hostiles are neutralized, we head in,” Nile said. She’d abandoned the drones for a pair of binoculars now that they were within striking distance of the building. 

“Got one,” Joe said. “Not the guy Andy was fighting with, but I got one.”

“Is he dead?”

“Not if he tells me what I want to know about Nicky.” Joe switched into Romanian and Nile decided he wasn’t talking to her anymore.

She really needed to learn a few languages.

“Copley, confirm your location.”

“He’s handcuffed and has a gun to his head. Call off your attack dogs or he dies.”

That was definitely not Copley’s voice.

“Andy! Neutralize your hostile and stand down!” Nile barked into the earpiece. “We’ve got an active hostage situation! Joe, same! Everyone freeze until the civilians are out!”

That gave her a few seconds to get out of the tree and run to where she could see the grounds of the clinic. Nile got herself into position under a shrub, weapon not yet targeted. She had a visual on Joe, who had his hostile on the ground, Joe’s boot on his back. The two civilians got into a car and drove away, apparently without noticing the skirmish breaking out around them. Once they were gone, Nile had a clear sightline across the grounds, where she could see Andy frozen into a strange tableau with a security guy who had the handle of her labrys threaded behind his back and through his elbows, with his hands tied in front. Andy had a knife in each hand.

Where was Copley?

“One at a time, you all are going to set down your weapons and lay face down on the ground.”

Now she could see the speaker, frog-marching Copley ahead of him and out of the treeline, about five meters from Andy. Copley had ice in his veins, because he looked like he was out for a stroll and just happened to invite along a guy with a gun.

“Fuck,” Andy said softly.

At some point, they needed some code words. Because there was no way any of them were supposed to know that when Andy said ‘fuck’ what she meant was that she was going to decapitate two men with her labrys and then break a pair of handcuffs. Copley was yelling, and Nile assumed it was in relief because the headless guy still had the earpiece so she couldn’t hear what Copley was actually saying. But then Andy was yelling back through the earpiece that she would damn well take a knife to a gunfight anytime she wanted to and what the fuck did he think he knew about anything he got taken hostage and any time he wanted to apologize for being over-protective and idiotic was just fine with her! Plus, you dumbfuck, how the hell do you not know how to break a pair of handcuffs don’t they teach you anything in the CIA? And why the fucking hell do you think it was okay to get taken hostage like we don’t have enough hostage issues on this team already where the fuck is your brain!

Andy still had hold of her labrys and Nile gathered herself up in a crouch to go rescue Copley when Copley reached out with both hands, yanked the labrys away from Andy (she must have cooperated because no one took Andy’s labrys without her cooperation) and then kissed her.

Shit.

So that was a thing.

“Joe? Any intel on Nicky?” Nile said through the earpiece now that Andy wasn’t clogging it with what appeared to have been a passionate declaration of love.

A fireball erupted out of the windows of the clinic. The ground began rumbling and the entire back side of the clinic started to slide down the mountainside. A muffled thump accelerated the process and Nile scrambled away from the edge as the flaming wreckage of Blessed Mary Medical Clinic collapsed and slid away in a plume of dust and smoke.

“Nicky!” Joe shouted gleefully, and cannonballed off the precipice into the flaming plume.

Nile took out her earpiece and threw it.

* * *

Joe broke both legs leaping into the rubble of the landslide and clinic, but he didn’t die. He waited for the dust to settle and his bones to heal and then surveyed the wreckage. Most of the hilltop had slid off. All that was visible was rock, dirt and uprooted trees. Or was that a concrete wall over there? It was too straight to be a rock. He hoped the clinic wreckage was close to the surface, or it might take him a week or two to excavate Nicky.

When Joe parkoured over the rockfall, he left bloody footprints where the compound fractures had soaked his boots with blood in the few seconds it took him to heal. That would be a convenient way to mark where he had already been.

The straight piece of concrete was indeed a wall, with gray paint under the dust. Some of the rubble here looked like busted concrete, rather than natural rocks. He bent and lifted a few pieces out of the way. His ears stopped ringing in time to hear squeaking. Bemused, he watched a white mouse emerge from the wreckage, look around, and then scurry off. He took it as a good omen and kept going.

Sunlight glinted off something a couple meters away. Joe left his concrete rubble and went to look. It was a large sheet of plexiglass, which must be the sixth level view window. Cracks ran the length of it, but the piece was largely intact. The window casing must have failed first, ejecting the plexiglass whole. Joe yanked on it and exposed a discolored section. 

Red. Red and wet enough that dust and dirt was sticking to it. 

“Nicky!” Joe yelled, using the barrel of his gun to lever away a large chunk of concrete. As he pulled the concrete away, he saw a bare arm straighten out and heard a moan.

“Nicky,” Joe said again, softer this time. 

That first piece was the most problematic, and Nicky was able to help move the rest of the rubble that was pinning him. Within a very short time, Joe braced himself as Nicky levered himself out of the hole on Joe’s arm. Nicky blinked as the scrapes on his legs and feet healed over. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; his pants were mostly intact; his feet were bare.

“Nicky.”

“Joe, habibi, I am coming to rescue you,” Nicky said, clutching Joe’s shoulders and peering into his eyes.

“I’m here! I’ve rescued you! Though it looks like you had things well in hand,” Joe said with a laugh.

“No, you and Nile are in China. Dr. Kozak told me. Come, I have to get out of here before the emergency crews arrive.” Nicky headed off down the mountain of rubble, further away from the clinic.

“We escaped, Nicky, and everyone is in that direction.” Joe turned to point to the hilltop, or what was left of it. 

“You only said you escaped to make me feel better,” Nicky informed him, “but now I’m free and I can come rescue you.”

With the clue that Nicky thought he was having an ongoing conversation, Joe figured out what was happening and stopped worrying that this latest death had scrambled Nicky’s mind. “Since this is just a dream anyway, let’s go my way. You can go that other way once you wake up,” Joe said.

Nicky paused and Joe had a chance to look him over. He was skinny and soft and pasty white, clean-shaven with recently washed hair now coated in dust, and that sniper look in his eye. He wanted to devour him and hold him forever, but first they needed to get back to the team and get out of here.

“I suppose so,” Nicky agreed, grabbing Joe’s arm. “I’m weak, Joe, she hasn’t let me stand up in six weeks.”

“Did she shave you and wash your hair as well?” Joe asked, just to keep Nicky talking so he could listen to his voice.

“I told you that already,” Nicky said.

“Right, okay, I’ve got you,” Joe said, hauling Nicky over a gap in the rocks.

Nicky flinched. “My foot.” He grabbed his ankle and looked at the sole of his bare foot, which now had a rock embedded in it with blood welling out around the edges. Nicky pulled the rock out and watched his foot heal.

“That was an odd thing to dream. Why would I put that in a lucid dream?” Nicky wondered aloud.

Joe stood there and smiled at him as he watched the sun dawn in Nicky’s eyes. “As much as I like watching you sleep, I’m glad you’re awake.”

“Joe?” Nicky’s voice was full of awe and hope.

“Yeah, it’s me. We really did escape. I crashed the helicopter. You win for best escape though.” Joe waved a hand at the wreckage of the landscape. “I’m impressed, I really am.”

Nicky looked around as if seeing it for the first time. “Oxygen canisters and a propane tank.”

“Good work.”

Nicky ambushed him with a fierce hug that crushed the air from Joe’s lungs and then let go just as quickly. “Stories later. Let’s get out of here.” 

“My lover is practical,” Joe said with a huge grin, and then followed Nicky as he picked his way over the rubble towards what was left of the hilltop, the joy and relief engulfing him to the point that he laughed out loud.


	11. Team

Nicky got in the truck with Nile and Joe, pulling a shirt over his head, his thoughts still scrambling to adjust to the unexpected blessing of his entire team being here. He turned his legs to get out of the way of the gearshift, which piled him mostly onto Joe’s lap while Nile drove. Wrapped tightly in the arms of the love of his life, Nicky closed his eyes and trembled with the shock of his ordeal. He felt Nile squeeze his shoulder and rest a hand on his back.

They drove through the night, stopping only for petrol, mostly silent, all three of them crying intermittently, a few sentences here and there to sketch the broad strokes of what they’d been through. Nicky’s relief that Joe and Nile had not been subjected to medical torture drew forth tears. He brushed off Joe’s questions about exactly what he’d gone through; he was not ready to speak of it yet. They’d been through enough trauma over the ages to know that healing must follow its own path and timing. 

At the safehouse, Andy hung onto him for several minutes. Nicky wrapped her up in his long arms and held her close.

“Do you want to stay together with everyone today?” Joe asked him once Andy let go.

“We’re likely to break the bed, wherever we are,” Nicky replied.

Copley handed Joe keys and an address and pushed them out the door.

They stopped at a market first, buying everything that looked good. To Nicky, who had been on a liquid diet for six weeks, everything looked good. He handed too much money to the shopkeeper and tore into the bread. The simple act of chewing blissed him out. He should help Joe carry their purchases, but he physically couldn’t stop himself from eating long enough to help.

The little apartment Copley sent them to was fancy, much fancier than any other safehouse they’d used. There were dishes in the kitchen cupboards and beds with mattresses. Plus hot water and curtains in the windows. Nicky couldn’t hold still, walking between the rooms, opening the cupboards, turning on the faucets, his hand full of dried apricots now. Joe started mixing dough for flatbread, so Nicky switched to fidgeting with a knife and the vegetables to get things chopped. He ate peppers, fresh basil leaves, tomatoes, wedges of cheese and a wad of dough that he sucked off Joe’s fingers. What remained of the vegetables, herbs and cheese went into a bowl.

Joe slid the flatbread into the oven to bake while he mixed a sauce and Nicky ate a croissant with raspberry jam, then dipped his fingers into the sauce for a taste. All this time, he’d been touching Joe whenever he was in reach - bumping shoulders or hips, grazing fingers across his back, or just leaning on him to watch over his shoulder as Joe turned the food into a meal. 

Once the flatbread was ready to eat, Nicky could barely pick at it. He wanted to eat it in huge, ravenous bites, but he’d already eaten so much that he worried that he would vomit it back up. Instead, he watched Joe eat. He marveled that Joe was really here, really actually here in the flesh, and that this wasn’t just a particularly detailed lucid dream. He needed to talk, but he was afraid that once he started talking, it would be like the eating and he wouldn’t be able to stop. 

“I’ll put the rest of this in the fridge. You eat it whenever you want. You can have all the food you want, and if you want more, I’ll go find it for you,” Joe said.

Nicky nodded. He washed the dishes while Joe put the food away and then came to wrap his arms around Nicky’s waist and hook his chin on his shoulder while he drained the water.

“We don’t have to break the bed tonight,” Joe said.

“I wanted to be alone with you, is why I said that,” Nicky said. “I kept thinking of what we talked about in Kyiv, and how you feared losing me and then it happened. I worried about your pain and fear that we were separated and I want to be completely together with you now.”

Joe turned Nicky around his arms and embraced him fully. “I kept going, Nicky. I knew I would find you again. I knew where you were and I knew I would find you.”

“Like destiny?” Nicky said with a smile.

“Exactly like destiny,” Joe returned with a smile and a kiss, his hand resting on the back of Nicky’s neck. “Nile pointed out that we can’t lose each other the way Andy lost Quynh. There would be a way to find you, with Copley and Nile looking online. You weren’t lost to me, just temporarily misplaced.”

Nicky laughed until he snorted, not just at Joe’s humorous turn of phrase, but with relief that Joe had not been crushed under the fear they had spoken of in Kyiv. Joe had kept going, and Nicky had somehow known that, as if his lucid dreams had drawn some truth into them from reality and not just from Nicky’s need to comfort himself by imagining Joe doing well. He laughed until he had to bite his lip when tears stung his eyes. He took Joe’s head in his hands and kissed him, gently and then more urgently.

“Nicky?”  
Nicky wrapped his arms around Joe’s neck, burying his face in his hair to smell him and hold him and reassure both of them that they were together again.

“Anything you want.”

Nicky’s hands and mouth were more insistent now, coaxing a reaction from Joe that he was more than willing to give. He unbuttoned Joe’s shirt and then guided him into the bedroom, kissing him between steps.

“I wanted you every minute,” Nicky said, pushing Joe’s shirt off his shoulders and then wriggling out of his own clothes. He flipped the blanket down.

Joe backed Nicky up to the bed and knocked him onto it, then climbed on.

“No!” Nicky twisted out from under him, passion gone in a flash of fear. “I won’t lie on my back tonight, Joe. Don’t hold me down.”

Joe’s eyes softened and he laid down and extended his arm. “Come here, amore mio, and let me hold you.”

Nicky put his head on Joe’s shoulder and pulled the blanket up to his chin. He didn’t want to be afraid and naked at the same time, not ever again. Joe held him, whispering to him in Italian until Nicky stopped trembling and relaxed against him. He had been through trauma before, they both had, and he knew how this went. The important thing was to be patient with himself, be honest with Joe about what he needed, and to focus on one thing at a time. Right now, he wanted to focus on Joe.

Nicky went up on an elbow. “Let me?”

Joe tucked a bit of hair behind Nicky’s ear. It immediately fell out again. “You’re here; that’s all I need. You’re here.”

“I’m here,” Nicky whispered, then kissed Joe lightly. 

He kissed down his neck to his chest, touching and stroking the body he knew almost as well as his own after all these centuries. He knew how to read Joe’s movements and the meaning of every exhalation and gasp. Nicky needed this even more than Joe did; he needed to erase Meta Kozak from his body’s memory and seduce the only person on this earth he would ever truly love. Thick, black curly hair instead of straight, dark blonde hair; broad shoulders instead of narrow; big, warm hands, someone as tall as he was, muscular thighs, and that gorgeous, gorgeous cock so thick and hot for him.

Nicky fell on Joe’s body, thumbing the tip of his cock, massaging his belly to make Joe writhe, and then took him into his mouth, swirling his tongue the way he knew Joe liked and then beginning to suck, one hand holding Joe’s hip down. Joe moaned and arched beneath him. Nicky drew on 900 years of practice to take Joe apart, thoroughly and slowly, savoring every second of his lover’s pleasure.

“You won’t come until I’m inside you,” Nicky said at last.

In reply, Joe bent a knee to his chest. “Hurry.”

Nicky slicked them both up and entered Joe slowly, watching his face and aching with the relief of being back together with Joe in every possible way. “Only ever for you. Joe, I have to tell you what I did.”

“Fuck, Nicky, can we talk later?” Joe gasped out, fingers clutching the sheets to either side of him.

Nicky laughed out loud, dropping down to set his hands on the pillow on either side of Joe’s head. He thrust, slowly and then harder, until Joe pulled at his shoulder and wrapped his legs around Nicky’s back. He felt Joe climax with an arch of his hips, and then hot come smeared between their chests and Joe groaned with the release. Nicky held still, the ache and pleasure of being inside Joe’s body consuming him.

When Joe’s clenched body relaxed, Nicky came, his hips straining against Joe, the exquisite experience of being so tuned in to each other’s pleasure whiting out the past six weeks from his mind until there was nothing but Joe’s body, the smell of him, the feel of arms and legs holding him, the breaths they shared, and the way the happiness wove around them as thick as a blanket. 

Slowly, slowly, the ache of the afterglow receded. Nicky pulled out, patted Joe’s gorgeous ass and went to get a towel to clean them up. Joe stretched luxuriously and gave a satisfied sigh.

Nicky slept in Joe’s arms that night, deeply relieved that the universe had righted itself and the two of them were back together.

* * *

The next morning, they worked harder at breaking the bed, but it was well-made of solid wood and there didn’t seem to be any point to breaking the bed just to prove that they could. Nicky rode Joe into the mattress and then sprawled out next to him, still breathing heavily, head resting on his arm. 

Joe’s fingers were light on his chest, just enough to keep contact with him.

“Touch me,” Nicky said, “touch me everywhere.”

Joe stroked him, rubbing and touching his body, massaging leg muscles and running the flat of his hand over Nicky’s chest and shoulders. Nicky rolled over onto his stomach and Joe covered his back with touch as well.

“You are erasing her,” Nicky said. 

“Are you ready to tell me?”

Nicky nodded, his cheek pressed into the sheet as Joe rubbed his back. “I seduced her; that’s why she unstrapped me from the table.”

“Some of the things she said and did in London made me wonder,” Joe said.

“If I was more to her than a lab rat? Yes, I was also her sex fantasy.” Nicky’s voice was hard with anger.

“She’s dead? She died in the explosion?”

“She died in my arms. I slashed her carotid artery as I kissed her, and then I crushed her in my embrace so she couldn’t trigger an alarm,” Nicky said. “I did her one bit of kindness. I did not tell her that she needed to understand why I did it. I told her the truth at the end - that I hated her and had only ever pretended to love her so that I could betray her and escape. I gave her permission to hate me with every heartbeat she had left. It felt honest, at least, after the weeks of deception and pretense.”

“Kindness and honesty.”

“And murder and betrayal. I tangled them all up together, Joe.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“Yes, I did. I don’t feel guilty about what I did to Meta Kozak. I knew from the start how I wanted it to end.”

Joe laid on his back and took Nicky’s hand to massage his fingers as they talked. Nicky’s words ran away from him, flowing out in a stream of memories and thoughts so Joe could help him bear the weight of them. He told him everything he’d already said in the dreams and more.

“She deserved it,” Joe said when Nicky’s words stopped flowing.

“I don’t believe anyone deserves to be betrayed, but I had to escape and that was the method I used,” Nicky replied. He rolled onto his side. Joe did as well, and now they were looking at each other across the pillow without touching. “In betraying Meta, I found the answer to the questions I asked in Kyiv. Do you remember? I wondered what I would do if I understood Booker’s feelings. Now I know. I know how Booker felt about us. He hated us, Joe. Meta talked and laughed with me, she brought me music and food, talked to me about healing people. And every word she said, every time she thought I liked her, made me hate her more.”

“Hate is very strong, my Nicolò.”

Nicky fell over onto his back and talked to the ceiling. “We meant nothing to him. He won the baklava bet and we all laughed, and the whole time he knew he was sending us to the kill box. We ate dinner together, met Nile and told her about Quynh, and the whole time he knew he’d told Keane where to find us and how to capture us. To lie, to pretend like that takes planning and calculation. And contempt. He didn’t make a mistake, or act in the heat of the moment, he planned it for years.”

“I don’t know if he actually hated us. We just got in the way of what he wanted.”

“Being crushed like a bug that got in the way isn’t much better than being hated,” Nicky observed.

“If you put it that way,” Joe said.

“And we never did anything hateful to him, Joe! Meta was cutting me open and taking parts of my body. Of course I hated her! We never hurt Booker; we tried to be friends with him. We couldn’t give him what he wanted, but that wasn’t possible for anyone to do. The only reason he gave for resenting us is that he was lonely and we weren’t. For this, he thought we deserved captivity and torture?”

Joe prodded at Nicky until he rolled over and then he spooned him, burying his face in Nicky’s neck. 

“After Berlin, I trusted him again. You didn’t. You knew he didn’t see what he’d done wrong and he could do it again. Did I hurt you when I trusted him again?”

Joe was silent for several minutes. “At first, yes. I thought you brushed off his actions too easily. But then it made it easier on me, that you took the lead in being his friend. It meant I could hang back and it wasn’t so noticeable as if both of us had hung back.”

“Joe, I am sorry.”

“I forgive you.”

Nicky craned his neck until Joe put his face within range and then kissed him lightly. “Let’s make breakfast.” Nicky put on pants, shirt, shoes and socks, just for the feel of cloth against his skin. He’d hated being naked all those weeks.

Once they were seated at the table with toast, fruit and coffee, Joe said, “So, what happens in a hundred years?”

Nicky swallowed his strawberry. “We didn’t really know Booker. Meta Kozak didn’t know me at all. She knew only the part I played to her. Booker has been playing a part to us. He would have to acknowledge what he did and say he’s sorry, and then we would have to get to know who he really is before we could make a decision. Andy was the glue of our team. He stayed with us because he loved her and she loved us. But we won’t have that glue in a hundred years.” Nicky wasn’t ready to talk about losing Andy. “We’ll have Nile, of course, and she and Booker seemed to get along.”

Joe cleared his throat. “About that.”

Nicky was surprised to see Joe fidgeting. “I know you two talked on the drive to the clinic.”

Joe filled Nicky in on the past weeks with Nile.

“Nile is asexual?”

Joe nodded.

“And in love with you?”

“That might be going too far. But she is very fond of me. Nicky, you haven’t spent much time with her yet, but her heart is so open towards us. She loves you through me; you should have heard her concern for you; the way she wouldn’t let me fall into hopelessness. She is strong, honorable and kind.”

“You love her,” Nicky said.

“Yes, as much as a thousand-year-old man can love anyone he’s known only a few months. I want you to love her too. I want the three of us to weave together like a braid. We can give her everything she needs without creating any distance between us.”

Nicky went back to eating to give himself time to think. Their little band of four had been irreparably broken when Quynh was lost to them. Andy never fully recovered. Booker filled in the number, but he never took Quynh’s place. Both of them knew Booker loved Andy, but it wasn’t the joyous and fierce love that Quynh had for her; instead it was a clingy and sad obsession. That sparked a thought. “Copley and Andy?” 

Joe shook his head, eyebrows jumping. “I don’t know what’s there, but it’s something. He’s better for her than Booker. He’ll push back. You should have heard them arguing about setting up the hit on the clinic! Booker would never argue with Andy. She needs to be argued with. Remember how she and Quynh would fight and argue and love every second of it?”

“Copley argues with her? Brave man.”

“Much braver than Booker.”

“You like him,” Nicky said.

Joe’s eyebrows went through the movements that meant Joe wanted to agree but not entirely. “I am cautiously optimistic that someday I will respect him.”

Nicky laughed out loud and Joe joined in.

“Have you talked to Nile about the three of us?” Nicky asked.

“No, of course I would bring this to you first.”

Nile was suffering the loss of her family, similar to what Booker had gone through and, based on what Joe said, largely because Booker had persuaded her to cut ties immediately. No honorable person would do what Booker had done to them, regardless of their pain, so Nicky didn’t believe that they had to prevent Nile from betraying them in the future. Whatever bond the three of them wove would be based on Nile as a person, not on fear that she might betray them if they didn’t act a certain way. 

“Let me spend some time with her.”

* * *

**São Paulo, Brazil**

In the year they’d been in São Paulo, Nile had achieved near fluency in Portuguese, which meant she could understand anything someone said to her directly, and occasionally could even follow along in group conversations when everyone talked at once. She listened to José give his long, rambling description of why the part she needed to repair the engine would take six weeks to arrive and followed all of it. He probably thought the smile on her face was because of something he was saying, rather than because she understood it all. It amused her that she was excited to listen to someone bullshit her. 

She left the fire station late; Joe and Nicky had left an hour ago, whispering about something and being very casual so she wouldn’t suspect they were planning something. Those two boys were delightfully transparent once you knew what to look for. Nile studied them as hard as she studied Portuguese. 

Joe’s outspoken, gregarious nature made him the easiest to connect with. It had taken more time and effort to make the connection with Nicky, and Nile sensed that it would deepen more gradually over the years. She loved his kindness and sincerity, the way he never said anything unless he’d thought it through and meant every word. At first, she’d thought Nicky was content to mostly follow Joe’s lead. Then she noticed Joe glancing at Nicky before speaking for both of them, and realized that they’d streamlined their connection so much that Joe wasn’t taking the lead - he was simply the spokesman.

What must it be like to know someone that well? To trust like that?

Nile caught a bus and dropped into an empty seat. She’d been on her feet all day. There hadn’t been many emergency calls, so Joe and Nicky got to lounge around, but she’d been deep in the engines most of her shift. It felt good to work hard in a familiar way. 

They hadn’t gone out on a team job since escaping from the clinic in Romania. Copley got them to São Paulo and Andy said they were taking a decade off to get Nile acclimated, and to let the furor about Merrick Pharmaceuticals die down. 

Copley gave them updates. Some medical oversight committee in the government made the connection between Merrick Pharmaceuticals and Blessed Mary Medical Clinic after the double disaster. Every medical ethics oversight board descended on everything that was left and began picking at the records like vultures. Nicky told them about the filing cabinets, and all the history of medical torture that he’d destroyed in his escape. The rot and corruption of Merrick Pharmaceuticals had been burned clean and buried forever, with just enough left to ensure that nothing Merrick had done would be picked up by any other company.

Then HM Revenue and Customs opened an investigation into Merrick’s finances.

Then lawsuits from people who said they’d paid millions in exchange for promised miracle cures that they didn’t get started appearing in the courts.

Then crazy shit from people who said they’d gotten miracle cures started appearing on social media and then in mainstream news outlets. There weren’t enough of them to gain any traction, and they were treated as a sideshow and then dropped.

Then the CEO, Iselda Merrick, died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm, though there were some rumors of a drug overdose. 

And it just kept snowballing. Nile figured that they didn’t need to worry about Merrick Pharmaceuticals anymore. 

Copley never did find out what happened to the box of tissue specimens. Nicky believed it was buried in the rubble of the hillside clinic near Borsa, and no one could prove otherwise.

From behind her, Nile heard the click of a smartphone camera. She would have to tell Copley. He grumbled about all the time he had to spend scrubbing photos from Instagram that had captions like, “look at this hair!” and “I sat behind this on the bus today.” It’s too bad Copley wouldn’t let them start a hair blog.

About two months after they settled into São Paulo, Nile found Joe and Nicky hunched over a computer screen, intently watching a YouTube video while Nicky played with Joe’s hair. The video was a cornrows tutorial. Every week, Nile got her hair done by Joe and Nicky, whether she needed it or not. 

It didn’t take long for Joe to decide to branch out. “What do you think?” he would ask, showing her a sketch of her with a crown of hair. Then he and Nicky would spend the evening trying to recreate Joe’s artwork on her head while she studied Portuguese. She was wearing one of Joe’s more exotic designs now. The braiding started at her right temple, criss crossed over the back of her head and poured off her head below her left ear, spilling through a ring over her left shoulder, the whole thing woven through with ribbons and beads. Joe couldn’t find the beads he wanted, so he painted wooden beads himself to get the ombre effect just right. He’d been so fussy about getting the exact shade of dusty rose for the beads that rested over her shoulder, mixing the paint himself.

Nile turned heads wherever she went. 

Sometimes she wondered if she ought to feel guilty about how happy she was. She still missed her family. The grief popped up unexpectedly when someone reminded her of Sakeem, or when she saw a mama scolding a youth and hugging her at the same time, or when Maria complained about how many cousins she had while she secretly loved it. But life was moving forward, and she was moving with it.

Joe and Nicky were a large part of her joy. They’d simply engulfed her in affection and kindness. In a thousand years (literally), she’d never hoped to find two men she could love so wholeheartedly, and be loved in return. She woke up smiling because she was in a world with Joe and Nicky, and went to bed feeling safe because she knew they were in the next room. They wanted nothing she didn’t want to give and she was delighted that they had each other.

Oddly, the closer the three of them grew, the happier Andy seemed to be. Andy relaxed in São Paulo. She laughed more often, told more stories, even talked about being mortal and growing old. Copley thought she wasn’t entirely mortal yet. He believed she was healing faster than a regular person, but not fast enough to come back from a mortal wound. There was no way to test that, of course. Nile didn’t like to recall the look on Copley’s face when Andy suggested she walk in front of a bus. Andy stopped making jokes like that.

The three of them didn’t ask Andy about Copley, or Copley about Andy. The two of them (and the team was grouped like that now - the three of them, and the two of them) had separate bedrooms, and occasional intense conversations, and once in a while an evening where the sexual tension was so thick the three of them would make themselves scarce and never find out what happened.

Nile got off the bus and walked the rest of the way home. Home. It was home and she was happy. She had a job she liked, people she loved, and her hair was kickass awesome. Life could not possibly get better.

Until she walked into the apartment and realized she was about to find out what Joe and Nicky had been planning. Candles flickered over the linen tablecloth, reflecting off the dull silver serving dishes. Three vases of roses presided over the place settings. The delectable smell of grilled fish and dill-stuffed mushrooms filled the apartment.

Joe, in a tuxedo with his hair and beard gleaming, appeared to take her bag with a bow. “Would the lady care to dress for dinner?”

“I don’t have anything formal enough for this,” Nile said, eyes wide.

“You do now,” Nicky assured her. He was wearing a topstitched blazer with tailored charcoal trousers, and Nile would swear he had gel in his hair. “Let me know if you need help with the buttons.”

In Nile’s room, a one-shoulder pink gown was draped across the bed. Nile took a quick shower to get rid of the smell of engine grease and then slithered into it, handling the buttons just fine. The strappy sandals were black. She put everything on and checked her appearance in the mirror. The shoulder strap over her right shoulder contrasted with the black braids over her left shoulder. She wondered if Joe had planned that when he designed her hairstyle. Then her eyes went wide again.

“Joe!” she called. “Did you paint the beads in my hair to match this dress?”

Joe arrived in her doorway and smiled that ear to ear grin that made his eyes sparkle. Then he offered her his arm. “Come. Let’s go make Nicky’s eyes fall out of his head.”

Indeed, Nicky’s eyes fell out of his head. Nile preened and tossed her head to make the beads click together. Her boys were never going to be disappointed that she didn’t want sex; she could be every bit as gorgeous as she knew she was and never get accused of being a flirt. She struck a pose with her arms up and turned in a circle so they could both admire her.

Nicky took Nile’s face in his hands and kissed her on the forehead, both cheeks, and then softly on the lips. “Shall we have dinner?”

Dinner was exquisite. The formality of it all made the clink of silverware and the splash of the wine even more exotic. Nile wanted to protest that she could have brought something, but the evening was too perfect to even think of something to suggest.

“Are you two going to tell me what the occasion is?” she asked as they finished.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Nicky assured her. 

He stood up and bowed, then gestured for her to come into the other room. Joe darted ahead of them to open the door to the balcony, where they had arranged potted plants and paper lanterns to create a tiny magical fairyland. 

“Stand here,” Joe told her. He snatched up his camera and took pictures, telling her how to hold her head and where to put her hands. Then he set the camera on a tripod and he and Nicky joined her on the balcony, posing for more photos. 

“We got the light just right,” Joe said, scanning through the pictures. “I’ll be able to paint this so we always remember tonight.”

“I still don’t know what the occasion is,” Nile said, though she definitely had her suspicions by now. 

Joe and Nicky exchanged a look. Joe raised his eyebrows. Nicky grinned. Then they both went down on a knee and reached into their jacket pockets in unison, retrieving ring boxes.

“Nile, when we dreamed about you, I truly had no idea that you would change my life so thoroughly, slotting into my heart in places I didn’t know were vacant until you came and made it impossible for me to think of living without you. You are the stars in the sky, constant and clear, the guidance I need. I want to spend all our eternity together,” said Joe.

Nicky started to speak the instant Joe stopped. “Nile, from the moment I saw you, I felt that we were destined to be together, that your presence would strengthen and heal all our broken places and change everything for the better. You are as life-giving as the river you are named for, strong, beautiful and vital. I want to spend all our eternity together.”

“Will you be life partners with us?” Joe asked.

“For all immortality and whatever comes after,” Nicky added.

Nile put her hands to her face, wept and nodded and wept some more. She said yes the instant she could speak.

There were three rings in the two boxes, no diamonds, just beaten silver with infinity loops woven into the band. 

“Joe designed them,” Nicky said.

“It’s beautiful. They’re the most beautiful rings I’ve ever seen,” Nile said, wiping tears so they wouldn’t drip on her gown.

“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Joe said. He wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb and then kissed her.

The three of them wove together in a hug and faced eternity together.

* * *

Andy and Copley cleared out after they helped Joe set up the plants and lanterns on the balcony, and didn’t come home until the next afternoon. They should have stayed away a few more days. Andy had thought that the no-sex thing would make this whole production a little lower key than a standard marriage proposal. Nope. Apparently, you don’t need sex to be drippy in love. The three of them were still weepy and swanning around with declarations of love and plans like they hadn’t spent every day of the last year together.

It was sweet, but a bit much. She and Quynh had never been one tenth as drippy as Joe and Nicky could be. And Nile. Nile was as drippy as Joe and Nicky, and Andy meant that in the nicest way possible. The girl couldn’t look at her ring without tearing up; Joe kept gazing at her in adoration; Nicky cooked. Well, Nicky always cooked, but he fed Nile tidbits with his fingers and Andy had never seen him do that with anyone but Joe.

Andy hugged everyone many times, admired all the rings as often as anyone wanted her to, stepped around Nicky and Nile to get a plate without disturbing them, dished up some leftover dill-stuffed mushrooms and stepped around them again (it was trickier that time because Joe had joined them so Nicky was feeding both of them and all three were working in a few kisses) and didn’t stop smiling until she sat down at the table, facing away from the happy threesome. She sucked in her cheeks because smiling that much made her cheeks hurt.

Copley gave her a knowing look. He didn’t have his laptop. Sometimes he would go hours without checking his laptop nowadays. He reached over and took a mushroom.

Shit. Was Copley feeling drippy? Eating off someone else’s plate signaled a certain level of . . . something or other. Whatever. It wasn’t like Andy hadn’t considered it. I mean, he’d kissed her pretty passionately after she saved his life that day they rescued Nicky (or Nicky blew up the clinic and they gave him a ride home, however you wanted to describe that). It had been a fairly decent kiss, too.

But Andy just . . . couldn’t. 

She thought in pauses that ended without a real resolution a lot where Copley was involved. He was just so . . . solid. Reliable. It should have been boring but it wasn’t. There was some sort of . . . barrier. She knew it was all on her side, but it wasn’t coming down anytime soon. 

There was too much romance here. She wolfed down the mushrooms, followed it with a swig of lukewarm tea and then stood up. “I’m going for a walk.”

The lovebirds in the kitchen didn’t acknowledge her.

“I’ll come with you,” Copley said.

Shit. That wasn’t exactly the plan. 

Whatever.

Out on the sidewalk, the only obvious topic for conversation was the three they’d just left. Copley’s smooth exterior kept breaking up into smiles and laughs at the thought of Joe and Nicky and Nile. The thing was, she couldn’t stop smiling about it either. It really was cause for celebration and joy. She’d wanted this - wanted the three of them to come together strongly enough to carry each other through the centuries. They would survive and thrive and do good in the world.

Booker would have to fend for himself. Andy could already sense what might happen in 99 years. If Booker felt alienated when it was just Joe and Nicky, he would never fit in at all now that it was Joe and Nicky and Nile.

“Have you talked to Booker?” she asked abruptly, cutting off whatever Copley was saying.

“A couple of months ago,” Copley replied.

Andy nodded, watching her feet walk along the pavement. “How’s he doing?”

“About the same.”

“Which is?”

“Drunk.”

Andy was disappointed but not surprised. Even with all the love and support she could give him (which she knew was less than he wanted), Booker hadn’t ever really changed. Now he had even less motivation to pick himself up and figure out how to live this life.

“He dropped hints he’d met someone,” Copley said.

“Oh?”

“Just hints. I don’t know if he really had, or if he just wanted me to pass that on to you,” Copley said.

“Yeah,” Andy said, looking away. “I’m not jealous.”

“I didn’t think you would be.”

“I’m happy for him,” Andy went on. “I hope he finds someone who can make him happy.” 

“That would be good,” Copley agreed. “It’s pretty amazing when you find someone who can make you happy, isn’t it? Especially after you’ve suffered an incredible loss and thought you’d never find that again.”

Oh shit. Was he talking about himself or about her? Oh shit again. When did the line between the two of them blur so much that she didn’t even know which one they were talking about? She had to say something to re-establish the line.

“I can’t promise anything, James. I don’t know if I have anything to give,” Andy said. He deserved better; she’d come to believe that over the past year.

“I’m not asking you for anything, Andromache,” he said in that rich, smooth voice of his. “I want to offer you something.”

Andy’s chest tightened. It would be some grand, romantic gesture like that production Joe and Nicky had put on for Nile, and she would feel cornered and obligated to respond in kind. “What?”

“An ice cream.”

“What?”

“An ice cream. A new ice cream shop opened two blocks from here and I haven’t tried it yet. May I buy you an ice cream?” Copley asked.

Andy stared at him, all her assumptions adjusting. Copley wasn’t going to crowd her. “Okay, ice cream. Let’s go get ice cream.”

“I have a question for you as well.”

Great, she’d relaxed too soon. This would be the grand declaration. “Go ahead.”

“What was it like when they discovered chocolate? Tell me your first experience with chocolate.”

Andy laughed. Copley was so . . . unexpected in all the best ways. “Well, we didn’t hear of it immediately. I don’t think anyone knew how world-changing chocolate would be.”

Andy talked, Copley smiled, and somehow she ended up with her hand tucked into his arm. She wasn’t quite sure how that happened, but there didn’t seem to be any reason to remove it.

* * *

Up in the apartment, Nile tugged on Nicky’s belt until she’d pulled him sideways and could slot herself in between them at the window.

“Are they holding hands?” Nicky asked.

“Get your sniper scope,” Joe ordered him.

Nicky ran for his sniper scope.

“Hurry! They’ve almost turned the corner!” Nile said.

Nicky snapped the scope into place, peered through, focused. “They are holding hands!” he announced.

“They’re holding hands!” Joe hollered happily.

“They’re holding hands!” Nile echoed. She grabbed Joe and Nicky around the necks and knocked all three of their heads together.

Eternity was going to be so much fun!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That’s a wrap! I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> I’m on Tumblr at [Lindstrom2020](https://lindstrom2020.tumblr.com/)


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